Who's Watching Who?

Another long day in the workhouse.
Another club meeting.

Tonight was the Open DPI hand-in deadline. The Open DPI (Digital Projected Images, or "slides" in the traditional sense) competition is in two weeks time. Each entrant can put up to 4 images into the comp (on to a CD or similar).
The club also handed out the folio trophies from last year. Fellow blipper Poondash won one of these here. So well done to him.
The evening mostly consisted of another club's folio works and we all had some interesting discussions as to what was good and not so good. A lot of the images were "composites" and were heavily worked on in Photoshop and the like. Composites as in containing more than one images to create a final image.
Many of us were debating as whether these images should be photos or just a digital image. I don't have anything against doing stuff on PS, but I hate it when images are so over done that they end up looking like paintings/drawings etc. A lot of people (judges included) like this trend and I suppose it is only an opinion at the end of the day. But I do find this "over Photoshopping" takes away a lot of the unspontaneous-ness that photography is supposed to be good for, particularly street photography. Talking of which, there was only one photo in the folio that fitted nicely into street photography.
That said there were a lot of "hmm, mmmm, ohhh' s", and they did offer some more insight to what judges look out for. Plus there were some very original ideas, which I have to say is rather difficult to do nowadays.