When a member joins the club, they start in the bottom colour category for scoring, which is yellow. Each colour category requires a certain number of images that have a minimum score before the photographer moves up to the next category.

• Yellow: 6 images scoring 18 or more
• Red: 6 images scoring 20 or more
• Green: 10 images scoring 22 or more
• Blue: 15 images scoring 24 or more
• Silver: 15 images scoring 26 or more
• Gold: 20 images scoring 28 or more

So, a new member must earn six yellow dot stickers (each from an image scoring 18 points or more) before beginning to earn red colour dots.

Examples

Gail, a fictitious new club member, enters five images into the first in-club competition of the year. For simplicity, let’s label her images A-E. In order, the scores she receives from the judges for this first round of in-club competition are 15, 18, 20, 15, and 25. In this case, two of her images (A and D) are below the score of 18 Gail needs to collect a yellow dot for that image. However, the other three all have scores greater than 18, so Gail has earned 3 yellow dots in this one round of competition. Note that the very good score of 25 with image E still earns Gail a yellow dot. Gail must continue to collect yellows until she acquires a complete set of six, after which she can begin collecting dots of the next higher value (red).

Anouk, another fictitious club member with some experience, already has completed collecting her yellow dots and has accumulated five red dots, needing only one more to advance to green. Her images in this in-club competition round, again labelled A-E, are awarded respective scores of 23, 18, 20, 23, and 28. In her case, the score of 18 is thrown out because it fails to meet the standard for red (a score of 20 or higher). The image with the least score that earns a red dot is image C; this image earns Anouk her last red, as she now has a total of six red dots. The other images (A, D, and E) all have scores that meet the standard for green, so Anouk earns 3 green dots with these images.