ONE of my favourite things in the Adver is the Swindon Advertiser Camera Club.

Membership is open to all readers, and there’s a monthly prize worth £50 for the best image.

I only wish I could take part in the club myself, but sadly there are two barriers to that.

Firstly, I work here and we’re not allowed to enter Adver competitions.

And secondly, even if we were allowed to enter Adver competitions, it wouldn’t make any difference because I’m a fully paid-up member of that unfortunate band of people who are absolutely no good at photography.

I’d hoped to become better at it with the advent of smartphones, but the exact opposite happened because I never got the hang of switching between normal mode and selfie mode.

A while back I was in a restaurant and some nice people having a kids’ birthday party asked me to take a cheery group photo. My first mistake was holding the phone directly against my eye like an old fashioned camera. My second was not checking to see which way round it was.

My third was dropping the phone on the floor when the flash seared my left retina. My fourth was not running away before an unsuspecting infant picked the thing up, checked the image and was instantly traumatised by the sight of an enormous bloodshot eye staring back at them like something from the foulest imaginings of HP Lovecraft.

Now I’ve got to pay for six months’ worth of therapy for the poor kid, whose parents have threatened to publish my details on social media and send a mob of people to my house with badly-spelled signs calling for me to be thrown in prison.

In spite of all that difficulty, I think there must be plenty of photographers at my skill level who crave some form of recognition. That’s why I’m thinking of starting my own specially-tailored competition.

In wildlife pictures, for example, I’d be looking for qualities such as most distant fleeing hindquarters, as anything from a robin to a rhino headed for the hills while the photographer struggled to hit the right button.

As far as landscapes went, I’d be looking for scenes which through the lens of any normal photographer would seem breathtakingly gorgeous.

However, points would be deducted for breathtaking gorgeousness, as I’d be looking instead for strange, out-of-focus vistas in which none of the colours were quite right and anybody who saw them thought they were peering into some horrible alternative universe of purple trees, black skies and carnivorous daffodils.

For cat pictures, points would be awarded not for the cutest and most endearing images but for the ones that made viewers question the wisdom of the ancient Egyptians who domesticated the creatures in the first place.

The reaction I’d be looking for from the average viewer would be: “Nah, let’s not bother getting a cat - they look a bit too murderous. Maybe we should consider something less frightening, such as a rattlesnake.”

For dog pictures, success would belong to the photographer who managed by an unfortunate fluke to make some healthy, noble and loyal canine look either afflicted by some revolting, disfiguring pestilence, or else like something recently recruited by Beelzebub to fill in for the hounds of hell on their day off.

Special praise would go to anybody who achieved this with a Yorkie or similar.

There would also be a special prize for the most revolting moment of personal grooming a pet decided to embark on as soon as it caught sight of the camera.