Ten Years Of Printing Perfection

The year is drawing to a close, but there's still time to put forward entries for the PPLA/Fujifilm Colour Printer Awards 2004. Hand printers and digital retouchers can enter any number of categories before 28 February 2004.

Steve Barnes, Steve Barnes Professional Printing & Processing, London. 3rd Place Buildings & Industry Category 2003

Ten years on, and Fujifilm and the PPLA will award the winners of each category £300 cash with an additional £700 for the overall winners of hand printer and digital retoucher of the year. There's also a possible £1,000 of Fujifilm products available to the overall winners' labs.

But prizes are not the only reward for successful entrants; recent news from Metro Imaging names three members of the new specialist lab, Kustom, as previous Colour Printer Award winners, so success in the Awards can also bring you notoriety in your career.

As part of our mission to bring you the inside info on the judging process, we asked Fujifilm technical expert Steve Feasey, what it takes for a hand printer to win the judges' votes.

Judgement Day: Steve Feasey, Technical Manager, Fujifilm and Alf Coombes of Manchester Colour Labs cast their learned views.

"If you want to impress the judges, consider the following top tips:

• Choose a 'tricky' image that the judges will recognise as being difficult to print. The judging panel tends to ignore the pictorial content of the print - concentrating on the skills of the printer instead - so try not to think about the image from a photographic perspective.
• Provide a 'straight' machine print to prove how the negative or transparency would have looked without manipulation. Don't be tempted to doctor the machine prints - the judges will always spot this!
• Provide a comprehensive list of the work that was carried out on the print, to accompany the entry. This is always appreciated by the judging panel because we can fully appreciate the various skills that the printer employed to obtain the final result. This is perhaps the most critical aspect of the entry, so it's worth spending some time on preparing this report."

Chris Ashman, Metro Art, London. 2nd Place Land,Sea & Air Category 2003

So now you know how to prepare the perfect competition print, here's a quick refresher on the entry requirements. Hand printers can enter work into the following categories:

Buildings & Industry
Any architectural subject, exterior or interior, ancient or modern, or any image that portrays an industrial subject - from small components to heavy engineering.

People & Occasions
Portraits, people in crowds or in action, weddings, social events, parties, informal or candid scenarios.

Land, Sea & Air
Landscapes or subjects in landscapes, in motion or static, close detailed or in full: historic or high tech.

Mark Charnock, Panther Professional, London. 2nd Place People & Occasions Category 2003

There is also a choice of three briefs for digital retouchers:

• Taylor James (Car/location brief)
• Oleg Micheyev / FTP Digital (Fashion brief)
• Peter Dazeley / Tigga (X-Ray image - open brief)

Deadline for entries is 28 February 2004. For more information or an entry form contact Jerry Deeney on 020 7465 5793 or email printerawards@fuji.co.uk

Decision time as the judges narrow down to a select few