General Notes from the Secretary
As you will read in Derek’s report we are the best camera club in the West Sussex area, having beaten all the big guns such as Chichester, Littlehampton, Steyning and six other photographic societies by a very good margin in the annual Regnum Print Competition. The prints used were authored by Derek Grieve, Ian MacWhirter, Paul Hayward and Martin Tomes. The prints were chosen by members of your committee as representing some of the best images seen during many of the previous competitions that had achieved a score of 18 or better. We are only allowed to submit 6 prints so some may have fallen by the wayside unfortunately. However any member can have a print selected provided that it reaches the 18 criteria, so please do not think that it is only committee members which are assessed, that is not the case.
Spread the news, talk to people and tell them all what a great club we are, joint first last year and outright winners this year in the Regnum. I hope to be telling the world how good we are in our county and local newspapers in the next week or so. Watch for the articles and until them keep talking about it and keep clicking.
Some of you may have thought that the last competition on “candid people” was a bit confusing from a comments and then marks from our judge. So did I as did some of the other committee members. We will be addressing this matter at our up coming committee meeting at the beginning of December.
I have composed a letter to our local Parish council about the state of the car park with all its pot holes which I hope to post this weekend. I don’t think they realise just how bad it is especially in the dark evenings we now have.
In the meantime I hope to see you all next week at our club evening with our speaker for the night.
Best wishes to you all.
Peter Picthall
Report on the second competition
16th Nov. 2006 Set Subject Candid people
Our old friend from Steyning Roger Tapner LRPS did the honours for our first set subject of the year. These make us put our thinking caps on and I find them stimulating, though I rarely do well in them.
This time the winners were mainly from four entrants. The top print of the night was Eric Keevy’s ‘Basket Cases’, but new member Peter Michell took top marks by getting two 20s with ‘Surely you’re not pregnant again dear’ and ‘A nose for a picture’.
Martin Tomes got 19 with his ‘Home Guard’ and Chairman Peter got 19 for his ‘Caloch Driver Moroco’. Well done to all those entrants for some good and amusing pictures. However, none of them were content with that; Eric got 18 for his ‘Grease Job’, Peter Michell got 18 for his ‘Cutting off a non Payer’ (he deserves good marks for his titles alone), Martin got 18 for his ‘Just the two of us’, and Peter Picthall got 18 for his ‘Click’. Finally a couple of other entrants got a look in, Jane Coward got an 18 with her ‘On reflection’ and Sue Jahan also 18 with her ‘Brothers’.
It is great to have Eric Keevy entering prints again after a worrying medical episode, now behind him, and getting winning marks.
After the break, Roger gave the en-prints some good discussion, and Sue Worsfold won with her man talking to a horse. Jane Coward was second with a gentleman and offspring picture and third was Audrey Grey with a ‘Man at work’ picture. Well done to all of them. Sue Worsfold has come first in both the first two competitions with Jane second also on both occasions.
Derek Grieve
Report on the Regnum print competition
Held at The Woodlands Centre Rustington on November 22nd 2006 hosted by Littlehampton & District Camera Club
Black Browed Albatrosses by Ian MacWhirter
PBY Catalina by Martin Tomes
Cornish Beach by Mike Davison
King Penguin Inspection by Ian MacWhirter
Red Legs by Derek Grieve
Shopping In Russia by Paul Hayward
What a night for Storrington Camera Club!
There were a lot of people at the Centre, with a very good turn out from Storrington.
The Judge was Bryan Powell ARPS and bar who judged the same competition a few years ago and who we have had at the club showing us how to construct posters. He started by saying that all the entries were first class pictures, but it was his job to mark them to differentiate between them. This he did giving quite a large number of 13, 14 & 15 marks. He also kept me greatly amused with a number of phrases that he used time and time again, such as ‘I’ve got to admit’,’it has to be said’, ‘no question about it’, and ‘without a shadow of a doubt’.
The first round had Brian praising Paul Hayward’s ‘Shopping in Russia’ up to the hilt, and then only giving it 16 marks, much to our dismay. However that was what he continued to do throughout the evening, and 16 turned out to be much better than it appeared at this early stage.
However, our hopes rose in the second round with Mike Davison getting 19 marks for his lovely ‘Cornish Beach’.
Next up was my ‘Red Legs’, which had him very worried as he could only see one arm. As I photographed all that I could see of the lady, I have no idea where her other arm was, but I suspect, that in this modern world, she was on her mobile phone. Anyway, the lack of the arm got me 16, and at the half way mark we were first equal with Mid Sussex, Steyning and Southwick on the same marks.
At the end of the tea interval we had the raffle, and Storrington got 2 prizes, though most seemed to go to Littlehampton members, no doubt to keep the costs down!
In round four, Martin Tomes striking ‘Catalina’ picture got 18 and knowing that the best was still to come, our hopes rose.
Sure enough, Bryan waxed lyrical about Ian MacWhirter’s ‘Black-browed Albatross’ and awarded the first of only two 20s given in the evening. Well done Ian. By now we were beginning to sit up in our seats and glow.
Final round and our other block buster, my favorite picture came on – ‘Ian’s ‘King Penguin inspection’, which brought on laughter as soon as it was put up. Bryan agreed that it had that wonderful humour whilst at the same time being a great natural history shot. 18 marks and we were home and dry.
Very well done to all entrants. It is a real feather in our cap to beat the likes of Chichester who are knee deep in FRPS, ARPS and LRPS qualified members and are at least 100 members strong.
SO, WELL DONE STORRINGTON.
Derek Grieve
Slide Competition
2006/07 Second Slide Competition
The number of slide entries continued to fall in this competition, yielding only 12 images from 4 authors-probably the lowest entry ever. This was a little surprising considering that the set subject “Candid People” should have given us a good opportunity to dig out examples languishing in our old stock even if we were unable to go out and shoot fresh material. Although coming at the end of what had been a long evening the slides were given fair consideration by the judge. Diana Newnes scored top marks with ”Monet, I presume” an excellent image of an artist working in the middle of a poppy field. Jean MacWhirter scored 19 with “Snap”, and Derek Grieve was given 18 for ”A private prayer, Prague”. This leaves Jean slightly ahead of Derek in the overall score this season.
The Sussex Photographic Federation held it’s annual Slide Competition at Wivelsfield Green on the 26th November. Last year we met with disaster coming last out of 17 clubs. This year I can report a considerable improvement. Out of 19 clubs we came 9th equal and we share “The most improved club” Trophy with Hailsham.
Ian MacWhirter
PC Security Part 1
Having helped a few people with their computers I know that very few people understand how to keep their computer systems safe on the Internet so I have decided to write about it in the club newsletter.
Use an antivirus package. Computer manufacturers often supply a limited time copy of McAfee which you are expected to pay for after a few months. Uninstall it straight away as there is no need to pay for anti-virus protection. I would recommend you download and install Active Virus Shield from http://www.activevirusshield.com/ or AVG from http://free.avg.com/. Active Virus Shield offers more comprehensive protection. You should also install Active Security Monitor, if you install Active Virus Shield it will guide you to the download for this.
Internet Explorer 6 is riddled with security problems. Hardly a month goes by without another serious flaw being found. This months update from Microsoft includes ‘Cumulative Security Update for Internet Explorer (922760)’, the summary of which is ‘This update resolves vulnerabilities in Internet Explorer that could allow remote code execution.’. That means there are websites you could visit which would then run malicious programs on your computer without your knowledge. These sites are real and do exist. There are two options, the best option is to switch to Firefox (http://www.mozilla.com/), if for some reason you still think Microsoft is the only way then visit windows update (http://update.microsoft.com/), choose express and install Internet Explorer 7. It is much better than Internet Explorer 6 but still behind Firefox. For some reason many people have problems accepting that Microsoft sofware is this bad. Believe me, it is. The pie charts at the top of this page show that Firefox has far fewer problems, and that there are far less problems left unpatched (that means they have not yet been fixed). It is also true that the vulnerabilities found in Firefox are far less serious than the ones found in Internet Explorer. Microsoft’s record on this is abysmal.
Don’t believe anything you read in an e-mail! Phishing is a major problem at the moment. If you get an e-mail purporting to be from your bank which is asking you to update anything simply delete it. No bank will ever send you an e-mail asking that you do this. Most importantly never follow a link from an e-mail to a financial institution of any kind. Always type the URL into the address bar or use one of your own bookmarks. My son fell for an e-mail claiming to be from PayPal recently, they are very convincing. Fortunately there was no money in the account and he had not yet linked it to his bank account so there were no losses. Both Firefox 2.0 and Internet Explorer 7 include some phishing protection. It has been shown that the protection in Firefox is more effective.
There isn’t enough space to say why these precautions are needed, I will explain some of that in the next newsletter. I decided it was better to set out how to defend yourself first and explain the threats later.
For further reading, the government and several high profile companies have created http://www.getsafeonline.org/ which is an excellent resource.