Sculptured

It was a wet morning, and we had a bit of rain on our morning walk but then it cleared up and was bright. We haven't been affected by Storm Babet, nothing like those poor people up north who have experienced storms and flooding. Here is my lovely girl looking very alert as she watches some dogs behind us.

I could not watch the rugby last night, the annihilation of Argentina by New Zealand was too sad to watch! We are looking forward to watching the match between SA and England tonight, it should be a very exciting match. 

After our walk this morning there was time for a quick coffee at home before I had to head off to attend the annual Surrey Photographic Association (SPA) competition. This is the first time I have attended, it is an individual competition and not like the usual ones which are inter-club. There are 44 camera clubs in this group and there were many entries today, their highest number of entries ever. I had entered all four categories which were Open PDI (digital images), Nature PDI, Open print and Nature print. I quickly realised that the highly processed photoshopped images were what the judges favoured, and as I only do minimal editing to my images I was not going to score highly. There were three judges and they could score between 2 and 5, so the bottom mark would be a 6 and the top mark could be 15. All the images getting 15 were very photoshopped images of controlled scenarios like those old fashioned railway station shoots or coal miners, that kind of thing. There were four of us present from our club, including our chairman, and we were all a bit taken aback by the favouring of such images. At the end of the day, there was a medal presentation - each of the three judges could choose their best image of the category, and blow me down when I won a judge's choice medal for best nature image of my big bottomed rhinos! (see extra for this image). I came home smiling after that!

Poor Meriel had a nightmare getting to the airport last night, Two Ubers just failed to arrive, so she tried to get the tube to take the train to the airport but the tube stopped working and she was stuck in a tunnel for ages. She was convinced she has missed her flight. It was all so stressful for her but she managed to just make her flight, and she has now arrived in N'Djamena (I bet you did not know that is the name of the capital of Chad!) where it is extremely hot and sunny.