Malcolm Fackender an excellent judge.  Gives useful, honest assessments in order to separate good images from the not so good images and is able to
explain his decisions to the members.

Let’s do a little re-cap  :   Practice Makes Perfect and gets better photography:

As you learn digital photography and acquire skills and techniques, they need to be regularly practiced in order for them to become entrenched in your mind. They should become second nature to you.

Exercises to make practicing more pleasant.

Go on a photo walk, get into the outdoors. There will be more subjects, more variety to the images you can create.
Set yourself a goal as to what you want to achieve and then work toward it.  The outdoors makes you feel good, you’ll get good exercise and great images.

Shoot one subject in many different ways, this may seem difficult, but once you start it gets easier.
Find something that you like or that appeals to you, then attempt to take many photos of it from different angles and in different ways. This really pushes you to the limits but it gets you thinking outside the box and trying new things. 

Take the alphabet challenge, you can do this anywhere–indoors or outdoors. What you must do with this little challenge is take the alphabet or a series of letters in the alphabet and shoot objects that either begin with the letter or look like the letter. This task gets you thinking and, of course, practicing your photography.

The object of these little exercises is to give you ideas so that you’ll take more photos.
One of the biggest hindrances for new photographers is deciding what to shoot.
If you are not taking photos, you aren’t practicing.
And practice makes perfect.

Author: Wayne Turner