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

Dennis Jones gave good comments aimed on the new PSA definition of Nature.

Let’s do a little re-cap  :     Establish your photographic style:

Photographic style is not a destination, it’s the journey itself. You don’t suddenly develop style. It’s the result of your experiences, an extension of who you are and how you see the world. It’s what you evoke in people viewing your work that makes you unique. Photographic style is not copying someone else’s style, but it’s about making your photography an extension of yourself. In other words, don’t just copy the masters, try to be one!

Discover what you’re passionate about. It’s easy to see which photographers are passionate about their work because it shows in many images
they capture. Enjoy your photography for the same reason. It will shine through.

Try new and different things to photograph subjects that challenge you.
Every new challenge adds more skills and more experiences.

Don’t be afraid to fail by taking bad photographs. Overcoming failures by taking better photographs only makes you a better photographer.

Assign yourself projects that you have not attempted before, especially those assignments that you’ve never seen done by others before.

Be free to express yourself. Ignore the set rules. (Set by whom?)

Be inspired. Attend workshops and seminars. Look at photography blogs, magazines, and books.

Act as your own critic. Look at your own collection of shots and ask yourself how they could be improved.
Is your work exciting to you or just another bird photo?

Share your work with your friends and family or go one stage further and sign up with photo web forums.
Attend local meet up groups. Treat all negative feedback as a means to learn.
Treat positive feedback as being on the right track.

Take a camera wherever you go. That one perfect shot is waiting to be captured by you.

Specialise on particular genre of photography but do it differently.

Decide on a medium. Do you want to photograph in black and white only? HDR images? Pick one and be consistent —and I mean 90 percent of the time. There’s nothing worse that browsing through someone’s portfolio to see color, black and white, and some HDR.
It cries out that you haven’t developed a style yet.

Try to describe your style to others. Do you capture the moment, freeze action, tell a story or do you aspire to being a photo journalist?
This will help to define your style by telling others.

Eventually, you will come to realise what your style really is.
One word of caution: don’t over-process your images.
Keep it simple and your work will stand the test of time.

Author: Geordie Parkin