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Thank you for inviting me to judge this competition. I've been creating word-pictures for forty years – in classrooms and newspaper columns, and at folk concerts. And for the past nine years I have made use of digital cameras and computers to tell stories – of soldiers training in the hills behind Waiouru, and of people doing similar activities in the Ruapehu area.

I could not find any set rules for judging this competition, so I started by looking over each set of images to figure out what it was that had caught your eye – what had sparked your interest – and then I examined each image more closely to see how you had set the camera controls and framed your shots to capture that interest.

Next I checked to see if you could have improved any individual image with editing. Would it have been more interesting if it had been cropped, leveled, made more vivid, darker etc?

I then looked to see if each succeeding image gave added interest to the viewer. Or was it practically identical to an earlier image? Totally unrelated to the others?

I took into account how big a challenge you had set yourself, and how close you had come to achieving it.

John Archer