Meeting Report
On Saturday April 13th, SCC hosted a presentation given by Mark Cottle MA who travelled up from Devon to give us an illustrated talk on 'Shackleton's Endurance Expedition captured on Camera', held at the Ashington Community Centre.,
Sadly our Chairlady Anne Nagle was struck down with a nasty complaint which made it impossible for her to be present, and so our Vice Chairman Paul Hayward stepped in to introduce and MC the evening making a fine job of it.
Mark grabbed everyone's attention from the start being a very polished speaker who knew his subject matter backwards.
This was the story of Ernest Shackleton's third Expedition to Antarctica which started in 1914 (you will recall that this was the year that WW1 kicked off) and finally finished in 1916, after some amazing feats of human endurance and courage.
Mark started by setting the scene reminding us of all the previous Polar attempts to explore the last unknown continent, Antarctica, starting in 1903 and including Captain Scotts disastrous expedition in 1912.
Our table top photography evening was our second practical evening of the season. There were several table tops set up with different lighting. Liz brought along some stressed plastic and polarising filters to bring out the coloured patterns in the plastic.
Our very own Derek Grieve won the 2012 Wey and Arun photo competition. 
First I should explain the title. Ian McGowan FRPS produces his photographic output in what mustbe a fairly large garden shed, so everything which he showed us literally came from the garden shed.
We hadn't done anything like this for a long time, we had a knockout competition judged by the members. The rules were so simple as to be almost non-existent, each member could enter up to three prints of any age, but they had to be mounted on a 500x400mm mount. Two prints were shown at a time and the members voted on which one they thought was best.
The evening was expertly organised by John Gauvin who cooked up a scheme which could cope with any number of entries. Alex and Liz also worked hard marshalling the photographs and counting the votes. At the quarter final stage his method became a bit more complex as each print had to be voted out at least twice before it was discarded.