Seen Better Days – 24-May-2012

Another competition to try out our skills and test the judge! A cold, wet night had a good gathering present to compete and enjoy some fine images. We also had two visitors – Antoinette & Howard and two former visitors decided they liked what they saw – welcome to Chris and Peter. Hope you get involved in the workshops and competitions soon!
On the subject of judging, when you get a chance have a read of James Allan’s piece on St Peter in the latest Camera Clips – it will make you think about what the judge has to do.

Before I get into the evenings competition, a few house keeping items:

• 7-Jun-2012: Will now be Jeremy Watson (of the Natural light portraits evening!) talking about his work and what people would like at workshops
• 17-Jul-2012: Edwardstown interclub – get your images organised soon. We will want final image names at least 1 week before the event
• 2-Aug-2012: Now the AV night with John Hodgson
• 30-Aug-2012: Now the Antarctica talk (and possible Astrophotography too!)

Outings

• We are working on a Queen’s Birthday outing – I’ll send out an email with the plan, but if your free on the Monday we should have something for you. If not, James Allan will be in Whyalla swimming with the Giant Cuttlefish and your invited to join him.
• We are also finalising the October Long Weekend outing – more soon.

Exhibitions

• The SAPF Annual Exhibition
  Venue: United Eastern Association Masonic Complex
  1 Fisher Street , Tusmore, SA, 5065
  Exhibition Dates:
  Saturday 14th July 2012, 12.00 noon through to the Official Opening at 7.30pm
  Sunday 15th July, 11.00 am – 5.00 pmWe have now sent off the images to the SAPF exhibition. The club aims to exhibit an images from each member who submits an image (we are limited to 2 by the rules), but we are only allowed to exhibit 10 images in total. We were actually oversubscribed on this occasion, with more exhibitors (and images) than we were allowed, so we had to choose the best of each potential exhibitor, and then reduce that to 10 out of that group. Selection was based on a vote by the 9 committee members present.
  Our apologies to those that missed out on this occasion – all of you were in there, and only missed out by small margins
  After a careful evaluation of the images submitted, we selected 10 different club members – and will also post them here later.
• Lindsay Poland and 11 other professionals will be exhibiting at SALA this year as Skrambled Eggs. We’re all invited to have a look and see what the pros do when they aren’t shooting for a client. They’re web site shows previous years – and it looks quite good. More details when I have them.

Now on to our competition – the theme was Seen Better Days – a chance to photograph those old, decaying objects and show how interesting they could be. Tonight it was immediate past President of the SAPF – Peter Phillips – judging our work. As Peter pointed out, the opinions he gave were his own – although the author might feel they were unfairly scored it was only an opinion on the night. Even Peter had experienced images that scored 7 when he was sure they were worth a 10! Peter pointed he judged more on impact than technical aspects, and his comments reflected that – once again good critique of the art of the image (one of those things we like!) with less focus on the technical rules. After the competition, he commented that the standard of the club images was very high – probably better than his last visit, and some great work was being displayed.

We had 120 images for Peter to judge (including Eric’s used toothbrush above – is that a Colgate or an Oral-B?) – mainly prints on this occasion, with 38 projected images (9 slides!). The range of images was fascinating with rusty cars, aged doors, worn toothbrushes, a dead bird, decaying houses, lots of the 12 Apostles (on the Great Ocean Road), encrusted ovens and broken pipes. That these things are around us constantly and we don’t really notice them is an interesting discussion in it own right.What struck me was the diversity of decaying objects. As Arthur pointed out in his talk a few weeks ago, decaying objects make fascinating compositions –  not just photographs. Well done everyone!

Head over to the Top Print and Digital pages to see what did well, and a few more.

Chris 😉