Was it good for you? It was pretty good for me, and that's not bad after just two years. The 2011 Guernsey Photography Festival has an interesting mix of exhibitions and some real standout shows on a beautiful Channel Island. It's hard not to be charmed, and with just a few tweaks I think you could be really bowled over.

The festival director and founder, Jean-Christophe Godet, runs it with just 10% public funding, and from a small-scale event last year (with four big-name photographers - Simon Norfolk, Tim Hetherington, Josef Koudelka and Judah Passow), he's increased it to a much larger event this year, including emerging photographers as well as big names.

Richard Billingham was obviously one of the biggies, and for me his show was one of the best in the festival. I really enjoyed seeing the Ray's a Laugh series printed at holiday-snap size - the size Billingham originally used and all the more effective for their understatement. These are family photos, but they're far from the happy family photos we usually surround ourselves with. The exhibition also included a video of Billingham's parents talking (or arguing) with each other, which made for gripping if unsettling viewing - their relationship was sort-of functional, but whether that was a good thing or not is hard to say.

The exhibition also featured some of Billingham's more recent work, showing his own young family and a very different environmen - his partner and baby seem happy and content, and their household much more peaceful. The last image in the series united the two projects though, showing Ray, much older but more healthy and the baby reaching out to him. A welcome note of redemption, it felt like a kind of salvation.

Samuel Fosso's exhibition, held outside in the gorgeous Sunken Gardens, was also a success, teaming the colourful Tati series, in which Fosso dresses up as fictional characters, with the black-and-white African Spirits, in which he re-shoots classic black-and-white shots of civil rights leaders. Some of the Tati series is pretty flamboyant, featuring Fosso in drag or as a leather-clad gay hero, and it was good to see it outside in Guernsey - it's a small, conservative island, and I imagine it pushed the boundaries.

Fosso also gave a great, if over-long, talk on 04 June in the Princess Royal Centre for Performing Arts, valiantly translated by his gallerist Jean Marc Patras. He explained how a young Nigerian refugee, who fled the Biafran War and set up a portrait photography studio in Bangui, managed to become an international star, and made it all sound deceptively simply. He started out taking snaps to send back to his mother, then it quickly progressed to more - for me, his earliest images were some of the best.

Carolyn Drake's Paradise Rivers was a more puzzling show at first sight, although the individual images, taken along the Amu and Syr Darya rivers, were irresistible - interesting, surreal and richly coloured. As a group they seemed pretty random, though, save for a more focused group on heroin packages seized by the Dushanbe Drug Control Agency. Drake's talk, held in the gallery on Sunday 05 June with Foto8's Jon Levy helped explain her thinking - she's been working on the project for five years and is now starting to edit it, making this show a kind of work-in-progress not a definitive comment on what she's shot.

In fact, Drake wants to resist clearly defining either her project or the region, though, and says she deliberately chose photography for its evasive, enigmatic edge. "There's something very nice in the ambiguity of the photograph," she said. "After working in multimedia and the chaos of video and media, the simplicity of the still image drew me in."

The Return Journey, a joint show with Dana Popa and Adam Patterson curated by Foto8, also made for interesting viewing. Both look at themes of national identity in very different places - Romania and Northern Ireland - and Popa's images stand out for their cool elegance, Patterson's for the depth of research in a difficult area (the Ulster Defence Association and its followers). For me one of the most interesting things about the show was the way both of them used family photographs, though, Popa showing a slideshow of her own family's snaps and Patterson compiling a photo album of the Ulstermen's sometimes violent personal lives. Proving that the personal is political, they added another dimension to already interesting work.

Jocelyn Allen, who won the Guernsey Photography Festival competition last year, showed both her prize-winning project, Reality of Youth, and a new series, commissioned as part of her prize, One is Not Like the Other. The new project shows Allen dressing up and posing as members of her family, whose portraits she also exhibited, and I thought it was a great new direction for her work - subtle, clever, and touching.

Some of the other exhibitions were less impressive though, and I was really disappointed by Nelli Palomaki's Portraits. The images are fantastic, but they're crinkled up in the frames and hard to see through the ambient light - this exhibition, like many others in the festival, was held in a disused shop, and while that's a great idea in theory, in practice made for terrible lighting in this show. Palomaki's portrait photographs are sumptuous and gorgeous, so it was a shame not to see them better presented.

Francesco Giusti's SAPE project also came off badly. His shots of Congolese gentlement dandies are fantastic, but the exhibition space - actually the space above seating at the bus terminus - let them down. Nobody wants to lean over a stranger to see work (especially not if they're drinking at 10am). The Tony Ray-Jones exhibition, The English, was also disappointing - pasted onto knee-high exhibition panels strewn around the busy Market Square, the images were lost, and sometimes literally pushed out of the way. On the plus side, many passersby stopped to look at them and at one point a brass band played right next to them. Ray-Jones would probably have approved.

Other exhibitions were too numerous to mention individually, but I particularly enjoyed The Place, The People, archive images from the local Praulx picture library, exhibited in the very lovely Candie Gardens. Some of the other exhibitions were of much lower quality though, and that's a problem for the festival in future - the local element is an important part of their funding-pitch, but the images in locals' exhibitions won't be enough to draw in the photography crowd. I'd say that's the real challenge for 2013 - sorting out whether it's an interesting festival for locals, or one which will draw the photography community for much further afield, beacuse at the moment it sits somewhere in between.

To go down the latter route they will need to improve some of the exhibition spaces and materials, and probably draft in a curator to create a really compelling programme. But that's actually not that much more than their current incarnation, so this is an interesting one to watch.

The Guernsey Photography Festival is open until the end of June.