Best Practice Guidelines for Clubs

These guidelines are intended to ensure that a judge feels welcome at your club and is made fully aware of what you require before judging commences.  It is the responsibility of your Competition Director and all club members to ensure that your guest feels welcome.

Stating your club’s position on judging

It is advisable that all clubs have an online presence (a website or public social media page) where general club policies can be stated and studied by members and judges alike.

Your club should have a clearly stated mission and ethos and these should be displayed on your website.  For example, a nature photography club may wish to ensure that all images conform to specific definitions of nature photography, while others may be striving for photo-realism or photographic artistry.

Your Committee and your Competition Director must agree on the judging and scoring systems the club prefers to use.

It is strongly recommended that for exhibitions the “WAPJA Exhibition Scoring System” is adopted.  This is an absolute system that requires images to be matched to defined standards (levels).  The judge will make any number of gold, silver and bronze awards, or none, depending on the perceived levels of the images presented.  However, your club may choose to set gold, silver, bronze (and acceptance) awards at different levels than those recommended by WAPJA.  If you require your judge to use a modified award system, please make sure he/she fully understands these before judging commences.

The advantage of using the “WAPJA Exhibition Scoring System” is that gold, silver and bronze awards will bear some degree of comparison between judges and between competitions.

If your club wishes to hold a competition, where first, second, third and merits are awarded, then the scoring will be relative rather than absolute.  That is, the judge will rank the images in order of excellence rather than compare them to an absolute standard.  In this case your club should define the outcomes expected from your competitions (number of places, merits or highly commended, etc.) and advise the judge accordingly.

You are encouraged to hold a judging information night, early each year, to let your members know how judges appraise images and whether the club will use the WAPJA judging recommendations or adopt a different system.