The Grand Valley Image Battle (GVIB) is an open competition held every fall with invited clubs in South-Western Ontario, including the Guelph Photographers Guild. This is a club competition, not an individual competition. The 2023 competition was hosted by GRIPS (Grand River Imaging and Photographic Society). Each club was limited to 20 submissions that hopefully included as many club members as possible. This year the GPG entered 20 images from 18 individuals. Entries were on a first come first served basis in an attempt to promote our less experienced members to participate in a friendly competition.

This year the Guelph Photographer’s Guild placed fifth out of sixth clubs who entered, much the same as our last effort. The Brant, GRIPS and Woodstock clubs placed first, second and third respectively with cumulative scores of 462.5, 452.5 and 440.5 out of a possible 600. The Guild’s cumulative score for the 20 entries was 434. Scores this year seemed to be 20 points lower per club all around, perhaps the outcome of live judging.

See the images below:

The first five images below are first and tied for second within the Guild entries with scores shown. Congratulations to Bruce Shapka for obtaining the highest score within the Guild with his image “Whisper”, his score tying for 10th out of a total of 320 images. Congratulations also to Simone Herrlinger, a relatively new member, who tied with Janice Balesic and Noel Upfield for second place within the Guild’s entries. Noel did remarkably well with both entered images scoring equally. Remaining images are in no set order, but all represented the Guild very well! Congratulations to all of the participants, and we look forward to continued improvement in the upcoming GVIB competition, to be hosted by the Guelph Photographer’s Guild!