As I listened to and saw more judges arrive my local camera club, I saw that many had BPE 1*, BPE 2* or BPE 3* after their names. I found out that these are award from British Photographic Exhibitions awarded for having your work accepted into a National Photographic Exhibitions hosted by various Camera Clubs around the UK.
I have decided that to compete at the Camera Club, I should try enter as many competition’s as I can to get an idea of how, camera clubs judge. As it is much different to I view my own images, as a competent Street Photographer.
The British Photographic Exhibitions will give an outlet for this extra feedback, plus I have set myself the goal of getting at least the BRE 1*.
British Photographic Awards
Taken from their website: The National Exhibitions which are members of the British Photographic Exhibitions offer a Crown Award system designed to enable successful exhibition photographers to gain additional recognition. Exhibitors are invited to aggregate their acceptances in the affiliated exhibitions and, upon reaching the accepted aggregate, to apply without charge for a Crown Rating Award. Each successful applicant for an award will receive a Certificate and a Ribbon and will be able to use the letters acknowledging their award after their name.
BPE1 Crown Award – 25 points
BPE2 Crown Award – 50 points
BPE3 Crown Award – 100 points
BPE4 Crown Award – 200 points
BPE5 Crown Award – 300 points
So from my understanding, one image accepted to a competition equals one point. 25 acceptances leads to the BP1 Crown Award, which is then awarded free. This appears to be achievable and also the entries to to the individual competitions is quite reasonable, around £10 for 4 images and around £2 per addition entry.
The exhibitions seems to be all similar, in offering several catagories for they image, although no 2 seems to have the same combinations – meaning you can enter an image into a few competions to gage its receptions and judging is by 3 judges each scoring out of 5 – the images accepted if achieve the required aggregate score (usually around 12).
I’m going to focus mainly on the Exhibitions that focus on Digital entries as they precludes the expense of making and posting mounted prints.
I’ll endeavour to report my process on the exhibitions/competitions I enter.
