Members of the Club take part in a number of exhibitions each season. The competition you probably hear most of the members talking about is ‘NIPA’ – not the Jack Russel used on the HMV record label (that was Nipper btw) - but the Northern Ireland Photographic Association who run the ‘Wex Photo Video’ Interclub Competition.
Larne Camera Club runs two Club Competitions in tandem with the NIPA Interclub Competition and for a number of years has awarded members for three of NIPA’s rounds, an Advanced Competition and a Novice Competition. In the 2019-20 season it added the President’s Trophy to the awards and made one or two minor adjustments to the Awards as a whole.
Previously the Club had only presented prizes (a shield for 1st place and certificates for 2nd, 3rd and 4th places) to the three open rounds. Starting in the 2019-20 season, this has been extended to include the two open NIPA rounds.
NIPA Rounds
For each of the five NIPA rounds, club members can submit up to four mono prints, four colour prints and four PDI’s. The club then submits up to four Mono prints, four Colour prints and four PDI’s, to NIPA in each category. Any number of entries may be by novices, but not more than three may be by advanced photographers.
In addition to selecting the images to go forward to NIPA, the top four images in each category from Advanced Photographers and the top four images from Novice Photographers will win shields or certificates as before.
Internal Competitions
In addition to the top four images in each category receiving awards for Advanced and Novice photographers, the points from a photographer’s top entry only in each category (Advanced and Novice) will be added to a running total from each of the five NIPA rounds that will go towards a total score to receive awards for the Internal Competitions for Advanced and Novice Photographers. (All of the winners of the 2018-19 Club Competition are listed on the Prize Winners page.)
There is an important change to the Internal Competition starting with the 2019-2020 season. Points will be based on the best score of individual photographers rather than all of the points a photographer may get from multiple entries. This means that the Internal Competitions for Advanced and Novice photographers will reflect the best of the best of our members in a given year.
President’s Trophy
The club is very keen to encourage its members to continue to submit multiple entries for each of the NIPA rounds and this year it is introducing the President’s Trophy. All of the points from all of the entries submitted in each of the five rounds will go towards winning the President’s Trophy. This will reward the photographer that submits a body of work to a high standard over the course of a season.
It is open to both Advanced and Novice photographers and the only rule is that an image can only provide points once. As things currently stand with NIPA, there is nothing to stop a photographer submitting the same image more than once at club level, providing it is not selected to go forward to NIPA. But as far as the President’s Trophy is concerned, points from each image can only be used once, even if it gets more points the second time it is submitted.
The Club also runs its own competition for landscape or seascape prints, The Davy Hall Award, held in honour of one of the Club's founder members.