Gloucester Camera Club - Photo Appraisal Group

Current Phase

Date: June 2020

Subject: Open

Overview: Recently members of the Club have started using the Facebook Group page to appraise each other’s photos. The PAG will hopefully provide more structure to do this but will also hopefully encourage others to get involved.

This is an opportunity to both submit images for peer review, and in turn comment formally on other members’ work. The benefits of receiving peer review on your image is obvious of course, but possibly even more valuable will be the chance to really review and critique other members images. This will help in your own photography to better assess your own work proactively. And the more you put into the process, the more proficient you will become which will have a big impact on your own photography.

We have had a much bigger interest than anticipated, our aim was for about 10-12 participants in order to make the commenting task manageable and so keep the quality of comments high. Since we have had almost 20 submissions, we have split in to two groups. We have tried to balance the groups with a cross-section of "Abilities" in each so there is a roughly equal mix of members from the each of the classes in club competitions. For now, we will keep the groups separate, but once comment sheets have been received, we will circulate details to access the other groups’ images.

Group 1 - Click here

Group 2 - Click Here

For the moment, we are intentionally keeping images anonymous in order keep comments focused on the image rather than the artist, so nobody need feel intimidated. However, you may be interested to know that there is a very nice split of experiences with members from each of the three club competition classes.

Useful Links

Intro Guide To Commenting - https://www.gloucestercameraclub.co.uk/pag/intro-guide-for-commenting

Taking Part in the Photo Appraisal Group - https://www.gloucestercameraclub.co.uk/pag/taking-part-in-the-photo-appraisal-group

Instructions: By email, you will have received the link to this page, together with a number of Photo Appraisal Sheets - one for each picture in the group including of course your own. (That’s just included because everyone in the group has been sent the same message, you are not expected to comment on your own image of course!)

The Appraisal Sheet (In MS Word Document Format) looks something like this:

The yellow highlighted elements are for information, and the pink elements to be entered by you the reviewer. The four areas in the appraisal sheet that you will need to edit are clickable. Firstly, enter your name, then your Technical, Artistic and Other comments. We have included a very brief Aide-mémoire in each section to remind you of some of the points you may wish to consider when reviewing the image. You just click with the mouse to select and type - the text there as a guideline will disappear when you start to type.

When saving the sheet, please can you prefix the filename with your name (Joe Bloggs%Picture Of A Flower.doc) – This will help us to collate the sheets when they are returned.

The Thumbnail of the Image is for reference only. This is just to help you to identify the correct image to review. You should make your review either based on the full-size lightbox view of the image on this page or from the original images as supplied by the authors which are available to download in a .ZIP file at the bottom of this page. (Note: EXIF Data is intact if present, except for Identifying elements like the Author or Copyright info fields.

A Description of the Image as defined by the author. Note: This is more for future use, we didn’t request that a description be supplied. It was added as an afterthought on the suggestion of one of the members (Thankyou) A couple of people have added a word or two in their submission email, and we have included this in the sheet where possible.

EXIF data extracted from the image file - Note: Not all images have EXIF data, this very much depends upon the post processing methods used. If present, then it is a useful reference.

For more information on commenting, please also see Kevin's "Intro To Commenting" guide that we have included here as well for your convenience.