News

Last week’s meeting – In the Footsteps of Shackleton with Eddy Lane.  This was a fascinating talk about Eddy’s trip to Antarctica and Frank Hurley’s trip with Ernest Shackleton a century earlier. This was a brave thing to do. Showing your images and talking about your journey was a tough call alongside Hurley and Shackleton, as both are the stuff of legend.   Eddy flew down to Argentina to a place near the Welsh speaking area. (Legend has it that the word ‘penguin’ is based on Welsh, ‘pen gwyn’ for ‘white head’) He then took a three day sail by ship to the Falkland Islands. On the way he caught photos of Wandering Albatrosses which, once fledged, spend eight years at sea before returning to the place of their birth to breed. Getting fresh drinking water is a challenge for sea birds. Some sea birds have their own a desalination system. They have a “gland (which) secretes (the) highly concentrated brine stored near the nostrils above the beak. The bird then “sneezes” the brine out.” 

Last week’s meeting – Turning Photos into Books with Michele Peters and A look at Project work and a look at AI with Phil Joyce. Michele has produced some 45 photo books. She has produced for various purposes; as a souvenir, a present, a thank you, but primarily she doesn’t want her photos to sit on her computer gathering digital dust, she wants to share them with others. In the past Michele had list of steps she would diligently follow to produce the photobook:

Last week’s meeting – Living and working as a professional photographer in Namibia with Scott Hurd  Scott was ‘zooming-in’ from his adopted home in Namibia and chatted about his time in and around Oxford many years ago before he started his talk. He explained Namibia was a highly unequal country with about one million people living in what he called ‘informal settlements’, that’s about 40 percent of the population. It the third lowest densely populated country in the world. He saw education as key to giving people choices in their lives and said many of the poorest children go to school because they get fed and had touching photos of the life of a young Namibian boy from an ‘informal settlement’ getting ready to go to school.

Last week’s meeting – Managing your photographs with Brian Worsley   Brian told us that managing your photographs is extremely important in the digital age given the number of images people take and store on their computer hard drives, external drives, usb sticks, cloud storage etc. Searching years of stored photographs of the one that you want can be extremely lengthy or nigh on impossible if you not organise your images with a way to search them.

Last week’s meeting – Digital Projected Image Competition no. 2 The results of Digital Projected Image Competition no. 2 were: First Pete Warrington Brief Encounter, Berkshire Downs

Last week’s meeting – GULAG: a journey into the darkness of Stalin’s Siberian prison with Barry Lewis  Barry’s talk was very well received scoring on average a ‘9’ from members. It was also a very well attended evening with 32 people attending and which 21 were members.

Last week’s meeting – “The Art and Science of Studio Techniques” with Tony McMaster.   Tony came with some impressive kit to aid his presentation.  Instead of using the projector he set up two monitors on stands so that we could see what he shot on his camera. His camera was tethered to his laptop and via Capture One software and the images were displayed on the monitors.

Last week’s meeting – Print competition No. 1 with judge Peter Cox    Unfortunately Les had Covid so he could not do his magic with projecting the images on the screen. Hope he is feeling much better. The new print stand was not available due to a last-minute mishap in my back garden on Sunday!

Last week’s meeting – Interesting Stuff with Justin Minns  And interesting stuff it was. He structured his talk around the Jim Richardson famous quote: “If you want to be a better photographer, stand in front of more interesting stuff.” However the photographer that has had most influence upon is Joe McNally after his wife had bought Justin one of McNally’s books, and this transformed his approach to photography.

Next week, Tuesday 24 October, is our first Print Competition 1. Please upload your digital images of your prints to Photo Contest Pro, deadline is midnight this coming Saturday. Two colour, two monochrome