Skill Level Placement and Advancement

The club has established four skill levels for awarding placements in our competitions, Novice, Intermediate, Advanced and Masters. New members normally will be placed in the Novice division, subject to a portfolio review by the competition’s chair. New members who have a record of being accomplished photographers, by trade, experience or through success at other camera clubs may be placed in a higher division when they join. The competition team has the right to move a member to a higher division should they feel this would be fairer to not only the member but also to other club members in the division in which the member had been placed.

The advancement procedure is based on placement points in the club competitions based on the most recent three club seasons.

Placements and associated points will be awarded in each division in each category. 
The competition team may combine divisions if there are insufficient entries to award placements.
There will always be first, second and third place awards for competitions, if there are sufficient entries.
Images scoring at least 23 points (in the Novice & Intermediate divisions) or at least 23.5 points (in the Advanced or Masters divisions) will receive placements up to 5th place. 4th and 5th place images will will earn Honourable Mentions. Images lower than 5th place will receive HM if the score is 24 or greater.

For the purposes of advancement, the Placement Points will be 5 points for first place, 4 points for second place, 3 points for third place, 2 points for a fourth-place HM and 1 point for all images meeting minimum scores as above. Images placing lower than 5th place and scoring 24 points will be awarded an HM and will earn 1 placement point. For competitions that have a low number of entries, the images for Levels may be combined. For example, Novice and Intermediate images may be judged together as one combined Level if there are too few Novice level entries. In this case, the placement points will for 1st place, etc. will be awarded to only one member in the combined group.

New for 2022-23 season: The Nature Trophy Competition will now award Placement Points for the winners. There will be two groups of winners, each with a 1st Place Trophy: Masters/Advanced and Intermediate/Novice. There will also be 2nd and 3rd place winners (no HMs). The two 1st Place winners will receive 7 Placement Points. The second and third place winners will receive 6 or 5 Placement Points, respectively.

Placement points are awarded for all Digital and Print Competitions, including the Nature Trophy Competition. No Placement Points are awarded for the Photo-Essay or Video-Short competitions.

The summation of all the accumulated Placement Points from each competition is referred to as the member’s Advancement Points. The number of Advancement Points required to move to the next level are:

33 points for Novice to Intermediate
42 points for Intermediate to Advanced
50 points for Advanced to Masters

Advancement Points are reset to zero whenever a member is moved to the next division.

*Advancement Points are a major consideration, but the Competitions Committee has the discretion to decide whether to move members to a higher level even if  they have not qualified by earning sufficient Advancement Points.

Members may submit a request for a change of skill level for consideration by the Competitions Committee. Changes in skill levels cannot be made in mid-season, however consideration will be given to move members more than one level at a time at the end of the season when Advancement Points and scores justify the move.