Altering perfectly good pictures

Meeting Report

Vice Chairman Janet was in charge this evening, as we are training her up for the next two seasons when she takes the Chair. Paul had the dreaded ‘lergy’, so why didn’t you take the meeting as joint Chairman I hear you say. I take the Committee meetings and the AGM and generally chivvy people behind the scenes!

They first thing Janet did was to hand out the winner’s certificate for last months Flickr competition and the winning image was by new member Andrew Caswell. His was a very striking image (well done Andrew), but the next two best images were from Daisy and Liz and were also exceptionally good. (I was involved with the judging, folding money should do the trick in future!?)

This was a members evening and we were given three perfectly nice images, firstly of a lady with shopping bags standing outside Birmingham station, waiting for a bus or taxi I would guess. Secondly a picture of a harbour with the tide out and lots of boats all secured to some big rusty chains. And thirdly, a woodland scene near Nutborne with a path running into it.

We saw everyone’s (Ten people entered images) different efforts at altering each image.

First up the lady, and the one image that stuck in my mind was Audrey’s version where she had removed the top half of the picture and then surrounded the ladies legs with multiple copies of the shopping bags, Other people just changed the background and altered the lady (Sarah turning her into an alien)

Then we had the harbour image.  We had several B&W versions, others where the boats had all been rearranged and Sarah’s version which included removing all the rusty chains so that when the tide came in again, all the boats would have floated out too sea!

Finally we had the restful woodland image and a lot of people introduced things like a wolf, a fox, a horse and the lady from the first image. Memorable was Chris’s version which was like a serious headache! 

Everyone taking part showed a lot of imagination and skill in what they produced, and although several confessed that they did their work on rainy days when they had nothing better to do, and others that they had lost the will to live after a while. Nevertheless, they showed great talent and had clearly had a lot of fun doing the exercise, using layers in Photoshop and various programmes that give images a different look. 

After the break, Martin frightened us all to death with reasons why we should take care of all our work somewhere away from our computers in case our houses burn to the ground or a burglar nicks our computer. He entitled the talk ‘Backing up your computer’ and showed us several ways with which to do this. He told us that all drives fail and therefore we need to make sure that we do not lose everything if this happens. He has listed elsewhere how to obtain these programmes. A lot of the storage places, like a ‘Cloud’ backup service for instance in the USA, which Mr Pictall found disturbing, "what about Trump?" he asked. I would point out that if he presses the nuclear button we will not be around to worry about our back ups, or anything else for that matter.

Finally, Janet gave us a slide show showing images of her recent Cycling tour of Cuba which  was very interesting.

Were all enjoyed the evening and our thanks to Martin for all his hard work with the projector and his talk.

Submitted by Derek Grieve on