General Notes from the Secretary
Another successful evening, this time with Don Mitchell and our abstract entries. Again a good entry of fifty odd prints to judge. Interesting that he did it by spot judging, i.e., the first time he saw the prints was the evening he did the judging. No mean achievement I think. There certainly were some interesting and innovative images and slides to look at and I think his judgements were fair and in keeping with the spirit of what we try to achieve in “set subject” competitions.
Our next evening promises to be interesting with some photographs from Africa, a favourite country of mine. It is a special place for photographers if you like animals and I am sure we are in for a treat.
The tea rota also seems to be starting to work and I thank you all for that. If you don’t have a copy of the email and mail I sent out and would like another copy of the rota information I will make sure you get one if you call me. It would be appreciated if you all make sure you know when you are “on duty” as it were. It will make life much easier for all concerned.
Martin’s wife Ruth had to be taken down to Worthing Hospital on Wednesday last week with severe tummy pains but I am pleased to inform you that Ruth has now returned from hospital and is recovering at home from her emergency operation for appendicitis. I know you will join me in conveying our best wishes to her for a speedy journey back to good health.
Peter Picthall
2006/07 Fourth Competition – “Abstracts”
This unusual set subject was always going to present difficulties for members. What is abstract?
How much photographic input is required? Some took a fairly ordinary picture and “messed it about” to varying degrees in Photoshop, often by applying one of the blur tools, and then gave it a fancy title. Others were far more creative and built their image from the ground up with virtually no ordinary photographic origin and these tended to be the most successful. One or two of the usual leaders in these competitions “crashed and burned” most satisfyingly!
Don Mitchell ARPS was our judge and he as always was good value, being not only fair and constructive but amusing with it. Some may consider themselves fortunate that this time he did not bring his trombone to entertain us!
Overall this very testing and unusual subject provided an excellent evening’s entertainment, a fair amount of instruction and quite a few laughs – what more could one ask for?
Prints
There was a big entry in this section of 56 prints, possibly a record; some judges would have baulked at this especially as he was spot judging but Don took it all in his stride. He looked at all the prints before the start of the meeting to get a general feeling of the standard and the spread between high and low. He gave each print about the same amount of time and paced himself well (I think a sign of a good judge). After seeing two or three prints in particular he made the remark that he thought he would have nightmares as a result! The judging took about 65 minutes which left ample time at the break for everyone to look at the prints and have a discussion.
Four prints were awarded 20 points. Peter Michell with ”Dancing with Light” was also declared the overall winner, the other authors to get 20 were our Chairman with “Delusions”, Eric Keevy with “Abstract no 1” and Paul Hayward with “Aliens have Landed”. 19 points were given to James Heath for both “Shadows” and “Illusion” and to Peter Michell for “Red Berry Swirl”. Our Chairman also got 18 for “After Mondrian” Well done all the above.
Enprints
There were a total of 15 prints in this section. The judge made the statement that he regarded this part of the evening as being very important as many of the authors are often newcomers to the hobby and should be given extra advice and encouragement. Don spent time looking at each entry in turn, discussing their faults and merits. In first place he chose “Blues and Greens” by Diana Newnes, in second place was “Arum Meringue” by Jane Coward and third was “November 5th” by Audrey Gray.
Slides
As usual we had 15 slides from our 5 regular contributors. The judge after seeing the preliminary run-through made the comment that as a collection they were not quite up to the standard of the prints. However he thought they were a noble effort considering the obvious difficulty of producing abstract work in this medium. Print workers have the luxury of using image manipulating software which is virtually denied the slide worker.
Jean MacWhirter was the overall winner with “Deep Blue” and scored 20 points and she also got 19 for “Spin Cycle”. John Goodfellow got 18 points for his “Shapes, Sculpture in Steel”
Ian MacWhirter
More on the Enprint Competition
I am sorry to have missed the abstract competition night, but I had the opportunity to go to the Camargue to see and maybe photograph wintering birds with a couple of my friends and I felt the opportunity too good to miss.
The results to date in the en-print competition are shown in the results tables.
As you will see, our two leading ladies have all to play for in the next and last competition. As Sue did not score this time, Jane is now in with a chance of snatching the lead. Jane has now come second in each of the competitions this year, which is very creditable indeed.
So, good luck to both Sue and Jane in the last competition, and may the best man win!
Derek Grieve
Backing Up Your Computer
I have spoken about backing up photographs on many occasions but I would be surprised if many of us backup our computers as frequently as we should. In view of this I set out to find a simple backup strategy which would ‘just happen’ and I have found just that.
Last year I subscribed to Carbonite which is an on-line backup service which is well known for its ease of use. The process is very simple, download and install a program and install it, and that is all – apart from parting with $50 for the service. You can backup an unlimited amount of data whereas many other schemes charge more depending on how much data you backup. The installed program searches your disc drive for files to backup and starts sending them to Carbonite over your broadband connection. It integrates into windows explorer and you can stop it from backing up folders or files by right-clicking on them and choosing not to back them up.
I backed up 90Gb of data in the initial backup phase and that took several months as I didn’t leave the machine on all of the time. Once the initial backup is complete it watches for new or changed files and backs them up. When you go to shut the computer down you can let Carbonite finish backing up and it will then shut down the computer for you.
It is difficult to imagine a simpler way to backup as once Carbonite is installed and running there is nothing else to do.
Is Carbonite enough? Well I think it is a good first step. However if Carbonite went our of business then you lose your backup overnight. Therefore I would recommend purchasing an external disc drive – you can by an external drive from £45 from SVP and back up onto that using SyncToy which is a free download from Microsoft. SyncToy takes a source (the data you wish to backup) and a destination (your external disc drive) and mirrors the source data to the destination. It is simple to install and set up.
If you do the above you will have your image files in three places – and one of those is off-site. The effort involved in keeping those backups up to date will be minimal. Remember that if you only keep your data on your computer you will lose it one day.
Martin Tomes
A few observations from the Print secretary
Only one more competition to go and you will see from the scores, corrected to date, that Peter Michell leads by one point only from Eric Keevy, who is ahead of Martin Tomes by one more point only!! So, there is all to play for in the last competition.
Peter has had four 20s this season; Eric has had three; Paul Hayward has had two; and five of the rest of us have had one! Martin has had five 19s.
Finally, I would like to congratulate Margaret Gregory on getting an 18 in her first Main competition entry, and to mention that James Heath has had three 19s from only six entries so far, very well done.
Derek Grieve
Full Enprint Results
Fourth competition 15th February 2007
1 Dianna Newnes Blues & Greens 3 2 Jane Coward Arum Meringe 2 3 Audrey Gray November 5th 1