Meeting Report

I have belatedly been asked to write this report as both our Print and PI secretaries are away on holiday - lucky devils missing all this gloomy weather!

Our old friend Eric Burchell (steam engine enthusiast) judged this competition for us in his own experienced style giving mostly quite high marks. There were Four 20s; Eight 19s; and Fifteen 18s out of a total entry of 54 PIs.

The overall best P I of the evening was awarded to Anne Nagle for her 'Parental Duties' which was a wonderful shot of a mother Tern with a small fish in its beak for its waiting baby which was screaming its head off as they do. Very well done Anne. Anne is currently second in this annual competition.

Second was Charmaine Hayes' 'Land Speed Record' - a picture of a couple of children tearing down a path on their toboggan clearly really enjoying themselves, and third was my picture of two male Fallow deer having a go at each other during 'The Rut'.

The final 20 went to Tim Hulbert's 'Crash landing' which was of a Hawk just landing back on its perch with its wings outstretched. A wonderful moment of 'action' captured expertly. Tim carried out the projection duties during the evening without any trouble at all which I thought worthy of a special mention since, as far as I know, he had never done anything like this ever before. Well done Tim on both scores.

Meeting Report

Tonight we had a welcome return visit by Derek Forss. He has been a professional landscape photographer for many years working for, amongst many others, the National Trust and Ordinance Survey. Derek also teaches photography at Earnley (south of Chichester) and leads photographic walking holidays for HF holidays, who have a house locally - Abingworth  Hall at Thakeham. I have attended both locations and have been on a holiday in Yorkshire with Derek as tutor (not that he remembers that!). Derek showed us some of his books including a couple which are published on line with www.blurb.com where they can be obtained.

Firstly Derek went through all the Olympus camera gear that he uses for his work (he is sponsored by Olympus).

Meeting Report

The second half of this evenings meeting was a very comprehensive instruction by Martin Tomes showing us how he deals with his digital images from downloading the camera's card to having it ready for printing. Sadly time did not allow him to show us fully final preparations for printing.

Martin downloads his images from a picture taking session into a folder in LlIGHTROOM  where he firstly converts all his raw files into DNG so that they can be read in future by all past and present manipulation programmes. The very latest version of say Photoshop CS4 is not necessarily able to read all files from the very latest cameras until they bring out conversion software which you can then download. All versions of Photoshop can read any DNG file.

Martin then showed us how he labels files with the date in year/month/day format. He also tags them with useful catagories such as location; subject; sunset; and then 'stacks' similar shots taken with different exposures for instance. He checks through and deletes any 'rubbish' shots,  (but Martin be aware that these shots could be competition winners!!)