I could probably write an essay on this. The photo-club dynamic fascinates me
I am in a club. I'm on the committee in fact. It's the second one I tried. The first one, was absolutely dire: they spent more time talking about club policy than anything else (remember the Dibley parish council meetings and you won't be far off), and the only images I saw, in the six weeks I attended were basic holiday snaps.
However! For the past 10 or so years I have been a member of the Holmes Chapel Photographic Society
http://hcphotographicsociety.org.uk/ an altogether more progressive bunch. We used to have competitions and even though my work isn't really typical of the stuff the rest of the members turn out, I did pretty well in them. We never took them too seriously though tbh, and we do have a good laugh at some of the winning images in the external comps as there are some solid stereotypes (beardy men, goths pasted into a background, birds on sticks, landscape processing that hurts your eyes etc). Recently though, we took the decision to remove scoring from our internal "competitions" to try and put the focus back on feedback, and encouragement/problem solving. We still have an external judge, who gives feedback and critique - but no score. Granted the feedback is still very technical - as judges cling to something objective and technical for the sake of consistency rather than just reacting to the image overall ("there's no detail in the shadows" or "the subject is not on a third" and so on) but it's start. I've also delivered a presentation on why you shouldn't pay attention too much to competition feedback and scoring, using data going back years I can demonstrate that there's no consistency at all in what one judge thinks vs another - about the same image.
We've had some fantastic speakers over the years, including Nigel Danson, Alistair Benn, and Christopher Furlong (an actual Getty staff photographer!), a volcanologist, a film production company, and, given our location, we have more than our fair share of astronomers. We also hold demonstrations - I tend to turn up with a bunch of lights and do something creative, and we've also done some pretty left-field things like wet plate photography.
I did chuckle at many of the problems people have quoted on this thread - as I recognise them all - we still have our share of members that don't appear to have shot anything since 1974 but can reminisce for Britain about some technical thing. Others who just don't progress; and the images do tend towards a "norm" (right now they're going through a woodland phase by the looks of it - see if you can spot which image is mine on the front page
). This is all fine though - some people just attend for the social interaction (much the same as the reason I go to the Photography show - I rarely visit the stands unless they are people I know). The one thing we rarely talk about is gear - almost all the shots we do can be made with any of the cameras people possess. We don't really care about "awards" (PAGB stuff, RPS stuff and so on). We do talk about technique though, for capture, processing and image management - and my next presentation will be on Lightroom's new weapons-grade masking engine.
Unless you join our club though, I really cannot tell you what it will be like, or whether it will be valuable: as lot of others have said, above, you'll just have to suck it and see. But - there are good clubs out there as well as groups of deluded old men convinced the merit of a photograph lies in the provenance of the lens used to shoot it.
