Man vs nature – a tricky topic!

The night saw new members and guests – swelling our numbers a little for the evening. We welcome Henk, who attended our Natural Light Portrait workshop and liked what he saw!

A few visitors attended the evening as well:

• Robert – and exchange student from Germany staying with James
• Terry – an ex-ABC cameraman (and friend of our new member Henk)
• Howard – who also attended our Natural Light Portrait workshop and told me afterwards he’ll probably join us regularly

Before I get on to the nights competition, a reminder of several important bits of news:

• We noted the passing of Barbara Mullins, a leading figure in photography and the SAPF for many years. As a mark of our respect, we made a donation to the Cancer Council of SA as requested by the family in lieu of flowers. Barbara will be missed by many people in the SA photographic and AV community!
• Jenny will be retiring as Treasurer at the next AGM – so if you believe you can take on this role, please have a chat to her about it and see if you can step in to help. Training will be provided!
• James is seeking more articles for Camera Clips – new things you have tried, what inspires you, how you’ve changed as a photographer. Please have a think about how you can add to this valuable resource for our members and talk to James.

So on to the evening of Man vs Nature. We had 84 entries for the night – not all in the set subject, but interesting regardless. Due to some timing miscalculations, our SAPF judge for the night could not attend. Fortunately, Ray Goulter (who has also trained judges) was able to step in and take up the challenge of judging our work and both judge and provide constructive criticism. Ray prefers to judge on the merit of the individual image rather than normalise the range to the best image of the night in a section. He certainly had his work cut out for him at times and some superb images were displayed – there were 10 images in the Colour Prints section that gained 9 or 10 points!

Once again, we’ve posted as many of the top prints of the night as well as the top digital images for you to view (as well as those pesky Editor’s choice images :lol:)

Cheers

Chris 😉

AND we are off and running for 2012!  The first competition for the year was themed ‘Mitcham’ – Images from the City of Mitcham.

The night was judged by Edwardstown member, Chris Carter, who had to contend with a smaller than usual entry list of 84 images (17 Album, 3 slide, 24 digital, 30 Colour Prints and 11 Mono prints).  Don’t forget to check out our gallery to view our top digital entries and (new for 2012) our top print entries.

Also new for 2012 was the re-appearance of the Peoples Choice award, sponsored by The Blackwood Pizza Bar.  This week, the Peoples Choice was taken out by Jo Tabe with her Lenswood Ruin image.

It was also good to see a few visitors on the night.  Peter, Gloria, Sue & Barbara from the newly formed Adelaide Hills Photographic Club made an appearance, to see how we do things.  We wish them all the best on their venture.  It was also good to see another visitor, David, who saw our images at the Stirling library and wanted to see what all the fuss was about.

Anyhow, looking forward to seeing you all again on Thursday the 16th of February at Marks and Jennys for the natural light portrait night

Cheers, Ashley

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.

Hope to see you all soon

Cheers

Chris 😉

After a few hiccups the Stirling Library Exhibition is up and running but sadly almost over!

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Kelly Morris, the Community Programs and Marketing Officer at Stirling Library kindly agreed to allow us to exhibit some of our images in the library from 15-Dec-2011 to 15-Jan-2012. This has been a wonderful opportunity to display the work the club produces and raise the clubs profile as well. Kelly even mentioned us in the Library Newsletter.

A catalogue of the 29 images (see the table below) provided by Adrian, Ashley, Eric, Gary, Helen, Hilary, Jenny, Jo, Julie, Mark, Melinda, Ray and myself was provided on the display along with a short description about the club. To date, over 140 of these little sheets have left the library! Kelly also informs me that there have been a few inquiries regarding joining the club as well!
The quality of the images was again superb and that’s not from me but from people I’ve spoken to outside of the club who have seen it.

Hopefully, we’ll be able to repeat the exhibition again this year so  please consider providing 2 or 3 of your best images for display.

Our thanks must go to the Adelaide Hills Council, Stirling Library, the BPC members who provided images (some at short notice) for the show and Kelly Morris.

If you get a chance, drop in and have a look.

For those interested in who displayed what here is the list of photographers and titles:

Chris 😉