Our eagerly awaited first competition of the year, the Quig Quaich Competition, attracted a wide range of entries across the six topics.
In the “Watercraft” section, the majority of the images came from a club outing to the white-water canoeing centre at Pinkston, with other images from various river and canal locations around the UK.
The “Pairs” section included pairs of marathon runners, pairs of leaves, pairs of gargoyles, pairs of flowers, pairs of birds (puffins and oyster catchers), and notably two speedway riders by Dale Powell, which scored the maximum 20 points.
Jim Stevenson had a top scoring image in the “Harvest” category with a drone shot of a combine harvester in a field of diagonally cut crops (see image at the top of this post). Dale Powell also had excellent entries in this section with images of chestnuts and a monochrome image entitled “Wheat from the Chaff”.
The “Glass” section contained images of a stained-glass window, various wine glasses, glass teapots, a multi-coloured light bulb, and an outstanding image of a Dalmore whisky bottle which scored 20 points for Martin Clark.
The “Insects” section included several images of darter flies and dragon flies, a burnet moth, and an unusual image of an insect casting its outer skin. Jim Stevenson’s “Burnet Moth on Wild Aster” was the 20-point scorer in this section.
The top scorer with 20 points in the “Precipitation” category was a night image of Glasgow’s Barrowland taken in the rain by John Sommerville.
Once the scores were added up, the winner of this year’s “Quig Quaich” was announced as Jim Stevenson with a score of 116 out of a possible 120 for his six images. Dale Powell was a close second with 114 points. Congratulations Jim and Dale – you were both significantly ahead of the rest of the field! As always, Bob Quig was a very fair and perceptive judge, noticing areas in each of the images which could be improved, and explaining how these improvements could be made. We are very grateful for his continued inspiration with this competition.