The British Photographic Exhibitions are a series of about 15 exhibitions, organised by UK photography clubs, which are open to UK based photographers. All the exhibitions have Open Colour, Open Mono and Nature categories, and some also have a mixture of Landscape, Portrait or Creative categories. Up to 4 images can be entered into each category and although the same image can be entered into multiple exhibitions, once accepted, it cannot be re-entered into that exhibition in later years. Acceptances gained in each exhibition can be accumulated to achieve BPE Crown Awards:-
- 25 Acceptances – BPE1 Crown
- 50 Acceptances – BPE2 Crown
- 100 Acceptances – BPE3 Crown
- 200 Acceptances – BPE4 Crown
- 300 Acceptances – BPE5 Crown
After BPE5, there are two further awards – Associate (ABPE) which requires a further 100 acceptances and 20 Awards, and Fellowship (FBPE) which requires an additional 100 acceptances and a further 30 awards with these awards coming from new images compared to the ABPE.
The standard of exhibitions is very high, with an average of just over 20% of submitted images being accepted, and only about 3-5% of images gain awards. Due to the relatively small number of exhibitions, progress through the awards requires several years. In the 34 years that the awards have been available, 1374 photographers have achieved the BPE1 level, but only 44 have progressed all the way to FBPE – a very select few, which I have not yet joined!
BPE1 Images
I entered my first exhibition at the start of 2018, and achieved a resounding success with no acceptances at all. I could have given up at that point, however before receiving this result I had already entered the next two exhibitions, and I received two acceptances in each of these next exhibitions. I then made steady progress, averaging about 3 acceptances per exhibition and achieved BPE1 in mid June 2018 after entering 10 exhibitions. The gallery below show my accepted images up to this point.
As you can see above, most of the images are landscapes, however We Built This City was a still life produced for a club Set Subject competition on the subject of Mirror, and the Falcon Portrait was an early composite image with an imported sky. In addition to reaching the first BPE1 level, Winter Woollies gave me my first award, which surprisingly was a Gold Medal, for the best Colour image in the exhibition! Four of these images would go on to become some of my most successful BPE images, achieving more than 10 acceptances – Winter Woollies (16), Winter Tree And Barn (16), We Built This City (15) and Winter On Twistleton Scar (13).
BPE2 Images
After achieving BPE1, the journey to BPE2 was much quicker, and I achieved this in October 2018 after just another 5 exhibitions. Most of the new acceptances were with the images I had already used up to BPE1, and although I gained a few acceptances with some new images, none of these went on to achieve any great success, the most successful being Tulips In The Window with 4 acceptances and the others no more than 2. However In The Line Of Fire was my first proper composite image that gained an acceptance and Elephant On The Run was my first Nature image, demonstrating an increasing range of styles. I also picked up a further 5 awards during this period.
BPE3 Images
To achieve BPE3 required a further 50 acceptances, so is a larger step than between BPE1 and 2. I achieved this by April 2019 after entering a further 10 exhibitions, so an average acceptance rate of about 5 acceptances per exhibition. Once again a large number of acceptances was achieved with older material, but I introduced a further 12 new images as shown below.
Of these new images, four of them would go on to achieve 10 or more acceptances – Promenade Assignation (15), Lofoten Moonrise (13), Remembering (14) and Groyne No 10 (10). A number of the images were ‘modified’ landscapes and there were now a number of character based composites, all from a 1940s re-enactment event. Between BPE2 and 3 I also received a further 9 awards, bringing my total to 15 awards so far.
BPE4 Images
The journey to BPE4 can seem a bit daunting as it requires 100 more acceptances, however with some strongly performing images still available to me and some new images I managed to achieve this in February 2020, after a further 12 exhibitions. I was now averaging about 8 acceptances per exhibition. An increased acceptance rate becomes necessary to progress up the BPE ladder in a reasonable time as the steps between BPE levels grows larger the further you progress. On the way to BPE4, I also picked up a further 12 awards. The new images introduced between BPE3 and 4 are shown below.
During 2019, my wife and I began attending character photoshoots, so my first few images from these events began to appear on the way towards BPE4. I also introduced some more elaborate composite images such as Dangerous Alien, which was constructed entirely starting from a blank canvas. Of these new images, a number went on to achieve numerous acceptances – A New York Minute (14), On The Dunes (14), I’ve Been Waiting (13) and The Rocks And The Water (11). Also notable was Long Way Down which was a very old image taken in Sicily in 2011. This did well in a club competition on the subject of movement, so I tried it in the BPEs and eventually it went on to achieve 9 acceptances.
BPE5 Images
The next step to BPE5 requires 100 acceptances. As this is the same as the step to BPE4, it no longer seemed so daunting. However in February 2020 the Covid pandemic struck, removing most opportunities to get out for photography, and some of the Exhibitions also cancelled their competitions that year. With most of my early images now fully used up, I needed to introduce new images, however I had a good back-log of images to re-work during lock-down, and we had just managed to squeeze in a winter holiday in Iceland before Covid struck, and that holiday yielded a number of successful landscape images. I achieved BPE5 in April 2021, a slightly longer gap than required for BPE4, but this longer timescale was due to there being fewer exhibitions to enter, and my acceptance rate remained at about 8 per exhibition.
My images were now a fairly even mix between landscapes and portraits – including my first female portraits – with a few more creative images thrown in. Notable successful images from this time were Black Beach Glow (11), Waiting For The Kettle (11) and Light In A Storm (10). I also picked up 10 awards, bringing my total to 37.
ABPE Images
After achieving BPE5, the next step is the Associate level, which requires 20 awards as well as 100 further acceptances. So far in my journey I had achieved 37 awards, so the ABPE appeared to be achievable, but was a significant challenge, especially trying to achieve the awards in a reasonable time. One advantage was that the awarded images did not have to be new ones, so previously successful images could still be entered. I achieved the required 20 awards in July 2022, after entering a further 17 exhibitions. As expected, achieving 20 awards was more difficult than the required 100 acceptances as I needed 120 acceptances before gaining my 20th award. Nevertheless, I was pleased to have come close to reaching both requirements at about the same time. The new accepted images at ABPE are shown below.
The next step towards FBPE requires awards to be achieved with new images, so I decided to retire all previously accepted images after achieving my ABPE. This meant that the most recent images show above had fewer opportunities to achieve a large number of acceptances, but After The Snowstorm, Into Mirkwood and Catwoman all achieved 7 acceptances. Twelve images gained the awards that I required as shown below, some achieving multiple awards – On The Dunes (3), Eye Of The Storm (3), Waiting For The Kettle (2), Black Beach Glow (2), Parisienne Nights (2), Catwoman (2) and Father Brown (2), giving me 21 awards in total.
FBPE Images
The final step in the BPE journey is the Fellowship, which requires a further 100 acceptances and 30 Awards. As the Awards have to be with new images, I had planned to take a break after achieving the ABPE to build up a good stock of new images. However I changed my mind and decided to carry on, thinking that maybe I had enough good images to choose from. This turned out to be a mistake and my acceptance rate dropped dramatically. So after some fairly unsuccessful exhibitions at the end of 2022, I decided to take an ‘enforced’ break, before returning in early 2024 to try again. So far, I have achieved 89 new acceptances, but awards have proved very elusive, with only 9 so far, so the journey continues and there is still some way to go before reaching the 30 awards required for the FBPE.
Gordon – 20th Feb 2025