There was not exactly blood on the carpet and there were no close encounters of the physical kind when the camera club met recently for its annual in-house competition – but that’s not to say this was an incident-free meeting.

For some reason this apparently innocuous event in which two teams are pitted against each other in a photographic challenge lasting over many rounds, brings out both the best and the worst in competitive behaviour. The best is displayed by the huge number of excellent pictures displayed. The worst comes from the withering sarcasm and vocal disbelief that is given both to the judges and to the opposing team. And yet surprisingly these two ingredients provide the basis for a thoroughly entertaining and friendly evening of looking at the photographs club members have taken.

It is not easy being a judge of any photo competition but when you are called upon to be a judge in your own club then that is really a poison challis. However, Janet Sadler, Dave Pike and Vic McAndrew rose to the challenge as they declared firstly whether in each round the teams’ pictures matched each other for content or style and secondly which was the best picture of the two. Indeed their task was made more difficult as the desperate teams stretched the bounds of credibility. This was most noticeable when one team put a picture ‘perhaps’ of Lake Winnipeg in an attempt to match one of a line of snow covered clothes pegs. Or how could the judges fail to see the connection between a shot of a solitary feather and the other image of a whole bird that had lots of feathers? Well apparently they couldn’t.

And so it went on until Chairman Peter Tickner called time on the event and declared one team the winner. Next year it will be exactly the same and all the better for it.