Butch Mazzola presents “Beyond the Rule of Thirds: 33 Hacks to improve your scores in photo club competitions” on Wednesday, October 15, 2025 at 7pm, Lone Tree Civic Center. Join remotely via Zoom. Join 30 minutes early for social time, to visit with your fellow club members and meet some new folks. The program is 7pm – 9pm.
This is a 45-minute zoom presentation that goes beyond the mundane. It’s a series of narrated visual illustrations of photographic techniques focusing on Impact & Visual Interest. We’ve all read, seen or heard the “standard approaches” to taking better photographs using the Rule of Thirds, Leading Lines, Framing your Subject, etc. But what is different about the “33 Hacks” presentation is how it’s illustrated with a focus on improving scores in photo club competitions.
33 separate hacks are illustrated in detail. However, attendees will soon realize these hacks are not stand-alone items. Just like cross-training in a gym, this is cross-training in photography, where every image you’ll see makes use of multiple “hacks.” This much I assure you, you will not look at club competitions in the same light after watching this presentation.
About Butch Mazzola
Butch Mazzola hails from Chicago, Illinois, a graduate of the University of Dayton, and a former Naval Aviator (USMC; Semper Fi & America’s Fund). Butch spent his business career in Denver and after retiring he moved to Vail, Colorado in 1999 where he taught skiing for the Vail Ski School and wrote commentary for the Vail Daily Newspaper. Butch bought his first camera in 2008 in preparation for a trip to Africa. He taught basic digital photography at Colorado Mountain College and has been published both nationally and internationally. His philosophy about photography can be summed up as follows: Impact, Visual Interest, and Storytelling are the fundamental characteristics that most often succeed in competitions and is what he looks when judging at photo clubs or just reviewing images of others. He believes that light, composition, and technical proficiency are not stand-alone aspects in photography, rather they are the essentials necessary to create impact and visual interest.
