Competition Calendar
Competitions in 2026
If you go to Photo Entry you will find that this year’s Competition Groups are now available to you. These are pretty straightforward.
We have grouped all the competitions which score points towards Photographer of The Year into one group, so its pretty large, but everything is in one place, and in date order of closing date. All competitions are now open for entry. As always any entry you make can be changed or amended right up to the closing date.
In addition you will find groups for Non-POTY events ie the Photo Trail and Critique Nights
And new this year The Monthly League – a member judged event which does not count for POTY points and is purely for fun and to give members experience of assessing images
| Date | Closing Date | Competition | Comments |
| 23 February | 2 February | Club Competition One | Print & DPI Theme Open |
| 13 April | 30 March | Club Competition Two | Print & DPI Theme Open |
| 18 May | 4 May | Local Theme | Prints & DPI Theme photos taken near to where you live |
| 22 June | 8 June | Architecture and Landscape | Please read the new rules |
| 5 October | 21 September | Bob Loynds Trophy | DPI Photo Journalism portfolio competition |
| 9 November | 26 October | The remaining Annual Exhibition Categories | Prints & DPI various Categories |
| 7 December | 23 November | Presidents Evening | Prints & DPI Theme set by President – “TBA” |
We have revised some of the limits on the number of images you can enter.
Print competitions will remain at 4 prints/competition but for projected images we are returning the number to 4.
We hope this will mean that every competition will get a nice big entry but if the entry exceeds what can be judged in the time available some images will be rejected. We call this capping and will be done if individual sections of the Annual get too big or if we get more than 80 images to Judge on any one night.
The Annual Competition
There is an overall cap on the number of images a member can enter into the Annual Competition, this will be assessed annually by the committee. In 2026 this will be 14 prints and 16 Projected Images, PhotoEntry will prevent further entries once the limit is reached.
Culling
We want to do this fairly so we are again making use of a Photo Entry feature, the ability to “Cull” images.
Photo Entry does this by rejecting the last image entered by you. So the order in which you input images will be important, put your favourite in 1st.
Photo Entry allows you to promote or relegate images with arrows next to each entry until you are happy with the order, so its easy to tweak your entry.
Any images rejected in this way can be entered again in other competitions and, to be fair, members who have not entered the maximum number will escape capping until the cap falls below the number they have entered.
Photographer of the year
The league table is generated by PhotoEntry which is based on your best 20 images of the year.
You will find the link to the table in the POTY group on PhotoEntry and it will continually update after each competition so you can keep track of your position
Each year we run a number of events which might have a competitive element but which are basically intended to be for fun, entertainment and a chance to learn or try something new. These events do not count towards the Photographer Of The Year title. [POTY]
Photo Trail
An annual event were members pair up (ideally with someone fresh) and undertake a number of challenges set for them. This is a single evening event.
Critique
On a number of evenings we invite members to show a few photographs with the intention of getting supportive feedback from the audience.
Show and Tell
These are an informal evening were any member can show whatever photos they like and talk about them. It is entirely up to that member wether they invite feedback or not.