Hi Mark,
Sometime back I seriously considered membership feedback and proposed an Entry Level competition to the committee. This made sense given the numbers of new members - many new to photography and in some cases new to birding. The issue then arose that a number of members felt that competing in the Intermediate competition was not a level playing field as some members competing in the Intermediate competition clearly have advanced photographic expertise. Hence the Advanced level was implemented. The main issue with the Advanced level, of which I am aware, is that too many Intermediate members are not moving up to the Advanced level of their own volition. The result is too many members submitting photos in the Intermediate competition and this needs to change. There are sufficient Intermediate level entrants that should move to the Advanced level to ensure more competition for our Advanced level entrants,.
You might have noticed that some of the committee do not enter competitions and I am one of these people. My view is the President should not be competing for medals I introduced and as I am part of the medal review panel,it would be most inappropriate for me to compete. Nevertheless, I do keep an eye on competitions and the committee will continue to improve competitions taking into account feedback such as yours - thank you for taking the time to contribute to the Forum.
Rules and regulations are put in place with the best intentions and sometimes they need revising. The rule that has been in place since the inception of the 3 competition levels has been that Gold medal winners must move up to the next level at the start of the next calendar year. Silver and Bronze medal winners are not required to do so and those members not receiving a medal remain in the level in which they competed. I am aware that this now needs to change and I am prepared to intervene and I will do so asking member to move to a different level at the start of 2019. As Rob Parker has pointed out, there are issues with our medal scoring when a member moves up a level mid-year. Hence, we should wait until the start of 2019.
Until recently Rob and I have been moderating the competition entries as well as the New Images gallery; we now have a dedicated competition moderator, which will free up my time to take a closer look at the entries in the three galleries and make recommendations to the committee.
As far as feedback on images submitted to competitions is concerned, it was my idea to introduce the Mystery Reviewers and it has been my task to find a total of 6 MR's. This has been a really time consuming task and one reason why reviews were delayed last year. One has to find suitable judges and then train them how to navigate the functionality of the website. I am now in a position where we have more than 6 reviewers. My aim is to have 3 reviewers per level - a total of 9. These reviewers are hand-picked advanced or professional photographers. Not all are bird photographers but all are nature photographers and at least 50% are club level judges. So why have MR's? The membership voting system is seriously flawed and this became obvious when I joined BLP as the Competition Co-ordinator in 2014. At that time I had started judging/critiquing at club level and when reviewing our membership voting it became clear that votes were often not aligned with the quality of the image, more often with the name of the photographer, a favourite species, perhaps even the most colourful species. Remember, any member can vote and thus some votes will be cast by members new to photography or not photographers at all. To eliminate the the name of the photographer issue, I implemented 'anonymous' photos displays until after the end of the voting phase. To ensure that photos entered at the start of the competition received equal viewing to those entered at the end of submissions, I introduced a random sort functionality for each time the competition entries are accessed. There is also a higher weighting given to MR scores as compared to membership scores when compiling the annual medal scores.
Good news is that you will find that the MR critiques align with the competitions this year.
Ideally, I would like to provide critiques for all entries but this is not possible. Club judges provide verbal critiques, which are quicker to provide to an audience rather than a written critique. I doubt that any of our MR's have the time to write critiques for all the competition entries and if this was possible, the 'fee for service' would be unsustainable for our meager budget.
I trust this fully answers your questions/comments re: competitions.
Graham