5, 220, 4 and 31,000. What does that equal? (other than 31,229 of course) Well, here’s what they represent…hours slept the night before, miles driven, number of previous finalists and amount of entries. Also chuck in plenty of tea and biscuits and a small camera crew and the end result…a very long but fun day pre-judging the BBC1 2009 Countryfile photography competition and another (brief!) appearance on tv.

Before you read on
The real stars of the show here are the final 12 photos that will make up the 2010 Countryfile calendar for Children In Need. And of course a big congratulations to the overall winner for 2009, Cheryl Surry with Snowy Squirrel.

Back to the behind-the-scenes stuff…
It all started at the beginning of the summer 2009 for me with a phone call from the Countryfile production team. Due to the shows time slot being moved from a Sunday morning to early evening they were anticipating many more entries to their annual competition than previous years. With that they decided this year a good way of narrowing down the thousands of entries would be to have finalists from previous years whittle the selection down to 3000 for the main judging of presenters John Craven, Jo Brand and fellow presenter & photographer Chris Packham. When they asked if would be interested in taking part, I’m not even sure they managed to finish asking the question before I agreed!

Meet the (pre) judges
The day started for me with a drive up to from London to The Mailbox, the BBCs home in Birmingham. I arrived at 9am and was promptly introduced to the small film crew and fellow judges and previous winners Richard Steel (2008), Claudia (2006) and Rosie (2005) which, including myself (2007), made the four strong panel that was set with the task at hand. Naturally, being part of the competition in this way automatically stopped us from being able to enter, as you would expect.

We’re gonna need a bigger crate
Initially, when I was first asked to take part, there was a ‘guestamation’ of there being around 20,000 entries. However upon arriving we were informed by the shows producers, who were sporting big grins, that there were in fact just over 31,000 entries at final count! With that they began emptying the boxes full of photos out on to the floor to set up for filming…and as they did so, the scale of the task became all too apparent! The pile just got bigger and bigger and more and more of the floor vanished under the sea of birds, insects, landscapes and other quirky photos laid before us. We were all looking forward to getting underway though, and as a couple of empty crates were placed for us to sort the photo’s in to, fellow judge Richard Steel turned to me with a grin and said ‘We’re gonna need a bigger crate’ (a reference to that famous line from the film Jaws, for any younger readers out there)…we were already in good spirits but that set the mood for the rest of the day with plenty more laughs and light hearted discussion to follow.

no, no, no, YES, no, no
The theme was ‘Wild and Wonderful’ so a broad subject with plenty of scope for interpretation and the ability to be quite creative.The sorting process started with great enthusiasm sifting through the mountain of prints, and the occasional slides, keeping an eye out for those ‘special’ shots amongst the sea of familiar species and subjects – you know, the kind of shot that stops you in your tracks and commands your attention for those few extra seconds. The standard of entries ranged from cute snapshots taken by children right up to those that were clearly taken by seasoned amateurs. For good measure, there were also a few slightly, shall we say, obscure photo’s that didn’t really follow the theme at all – ranging from a pair of wellies on a garden path to a photo of a rather happy looking old chap drinking a pint of beer in a lovely looking countryside pub garden. It was a real eye opener to be on this side of a photography competition though and we were amazed by the amount of almost identical shots that came through. So, regardless of the experience of the entrant, once you have seen the same photo 20 or 30 times you really start to find yourself becoming quite ruthless in order to narrow those images down and really weed out the stand out images – and with that comes a degree of guilt, because the more images you see the tougher you become with your criteria for accepting them. However, the up side of that is it made the more unique images really shout out at you, with some images in particular being especially impressive and stopping us all in our tracks. One of my favourite images being of early golden morning light shinning through some trees and lighting up both a deer grazing and a squirrel climbing up an adjacent tree…a truly stunning image that I would love to be mine!

Blink and you’d miss it
We had a fantastic day, we were fed and watered throughout to keep us happy and our concentration levels high. I met some lovely people in both the fellow judges and the production team, had a great laugh and it was fantastic to see so many images from all over the country. It was a long day, finishing up at almost 9pm that night but a great experience…and one that was summed up with a very brief 2 minute section on the show before the emphasis was placed on the shows presenters making the final selection and picking 12 finalists from our 3000.

Speaking of which
The real stars of the show though, are those finalists and their images, which can be seen HERE on the BBC Countryfile website. ‘Perfect Poise’ and ‘Morning Light’ (as mentioned above) being two of my favourites that I picked on the day, so really pleased they made it through to the final 12…which will make up the Children In Need calendar for 2010. So very well done all!!

Wait, there’s more…
One final note, please do check out the websites of my fellow pre-judges, not only really nice friendly people but also very creative and talented to boot!

And last but not least, you can see my winning image from the 2007 competition HERE.

Oh and also, many thanks to Rosy and the sound man for taking some of the above shots with my camera…much appreciated!