Welcome back

I hope you’ve all had a good break and are ready for a new year of photography fun!

We’ve kicked off the New Year with an AudioVisual night. It was good to see so many faces return for the first meeting, and even a couple of visitors – Theen (who is posting some interesting images on Flickr in the club site) and Vicki’s friend Alison – welcome. We hope you can come back and share.

The night was the first outing for our newly colour calibrated computer/screen/projector (thanks Ashley) and let us have some AV fun.

I started things rolling with Shades of Red – a photo essay about the colour red – ranging from people to machinery, to flowers & fruit, macros (photo stacks) and light.

This was followed by Mark Pedlar presenting what he found in a 40 minute shoot around the garden. He also filled in some time while we waited at one stage with the trip he & Jenny took to Paris last year. Brilliant images from that too (though there were a lot of bars). I think a club outing here would be perfect!

James Allan showed off his trip to Branxholm in Tasmania – complete with broken gearbox, heavy rain, some great shots of temperate rainforest and tin mines – once again highlighting his ability to see things from a different angle.

Things then stepped up a notch with the expert image manipulation of John Vidgeon – displaying firstly a series of images merged onto driftwood textures and then the Sweeps Festival in Rochester, UK. In both cases a well crafted series of images highlight both the eye of the photographer and image processing methods. John’s experience with AV is well worth seeking out.

Heather Connolly gave us two slide shows – one of Kaikoura in New Zealand to watch whales (and albatross!) and one from her sisters trip to the sub-Antarctic islands highlighting the abundant wildlife, scenery and wind! Another candidate for a club outing 😆

Helen Whitford gave us the best of summer – images of what she’d been up to so far including her nieces wedding, a trip to Werribee zoo, New Years Eve as well as shots around her garden.

The presentations methods varied a little – with PowerPoint, OpenOffice, Photo2Exe, Aperture and Windows Live Essentials Movie Maker. Whatever method was used – they all gave us some enjoyable imagery.

Well done everyone!

A bit of housekeeping news:

Our next competition is Mitcham – images from the City of Mitcham (see these map links from Mitcham Council or the SA Council Maps sites for city limits). Images must be from the region and may be included in the calendar this year to give it more local flavour.
Please get your money for calendars in to Jenny as soon as possible – and please return any unused calendars. We have about 40 unsold – a pretty good effort which will help the clubs coffers. Thanks again to James for preparing, organising printing and chasing us all for images!
There may be some changes to the programme during the year – mainly dates. You’ll be emailed with the updates.
A reminder about competition entries. We have to be a little stricter due to the large number of entries, and so:
- we will accept print entries from 7:30pm until 7:45pm on competition nights, late entries may not be entered. This is important for both the judges and our time keeping. We intend starting judging before 8pm
- all digital entries must comply with the naming and size conventions outlined in the programme. Gary has indicated that entries that don’t meet the criteria will not be considered!
  Please ensure images are under 500kb in size and file names are in the format
  Photographers Name_Image name_Category
  (where Category is either Open or Set). Note the use of the underscore character.
  eg Joe Bloggs_The Winning photograph_Set
  If your not sure, ask. You can also have a read of the competition entry rules here
I’ve updated the Camera Clips page for those that don’t receive it – with James’ latest information. Its a good read as always, and includes some useful tips about noise reduction, lightning photography and the calotype process.