This was an evening of two halves, slide shows shown in the conventional manner and those shown with most images at 90 degrees to the norm giving some of us sore necks!
Ian McBean started the evening by showing us some mouth watering shots of Mauritius, having first showed us where in the world it is. I imagine some of us will put it on our list of places to visit one day.
Then Martin Tomes showed us a very well constructed slide show of his visit to France in the Champagne and Borgogne regions. He showed several of the very many producers premises which were very old and very pretty. But I found his pictures taken aboard a canal boat during a trip which included going through a tunnel the most amazing due largely to Martin's use of zoom effects from his slide show software.
Then Clive showed us how the other half live with shots from his trip to the Caribbean aboard a luxury liner which was enormous and stood up out of the water the height of a tall block of flats. Having gone through several severe gales in the Navy in an enormous Aircraft carrier, my mind is blown by the power of the stabilisers on the ships. Most of us can only afford to go to Bexhill!
Next we had our first comedy show of the evening given by Robert Mitchell of his holiday in Egypt. His going at all depended on his brother's dog dying first! (He went with his brother). That thankfully(?) happened and we then saw many shots of the Sphinx, the Pyramids and his brother, all on their sides, which gave us all a good chuckle. Seriously though they did give us a good feel for the area but at 90 degrees! He blamed his Grandson for the presentation until he realised that he was showing us the wrong CD.
After the break we had a look at John Gauvin's very well made video tutorial showing us how to prepare our PIs for competitions. It will be on all our PI memory sticks, so we have no excuse to get them wrong in future.
Next up was Terence Bermingham with a very professional slide show (done with Pro Show Gold) in several 'chapters' starting with last year's Shoreham Air Show with the Hurricane, the Flying Fortress and other WW2 'planes followed by gliders including a lot of shots taken from the air in a two seat glider. Then came various sports: cricket, football, athletics; then lots of wildlife on safari in Africa: lions, Hippos, wildebeestsand lots of colourful birds.
Tim and Jane Hulbert's visit to Sri Lanka was next with shots of some very colourful carvings and statues and a glimpse of the exotic beaches.
Audrey was next with her trip to the Galápagos. She showed us lots of pictures of all the amazing wildlife including iguanas, sea lions, penguins, frigate birds, boobies, tortoises (including George who is over 100 years old but not expected to go on much longer) and some very colourful crabs, to name but a few.
Then we had the other comedy 'on it's side show' of Paris [it wasn't Di's fault they were on their side, we don't own PowerPoint and there was a very old version of Open Office on the machine which converted the show badly (note to self, update the laptop and include a proper PowerPoint reader.), Ed.]. Our Chairman had flown to Manchester on the morning of the show and whilst waiting for her flight back she lay on a bench and put some of her pictures taken in Paris earlier this year into a PowerPoint presentation. This took about 10 minutes to download and convert itself and because she had been lying down whilst composing the show most of the images were at 90 degrees to the norm. It was very refreshing to see the Arc de Triomphewith a very wide base indeed and a very short Eiffeltower. Actually, Di showed us a lot of the stunning architecture of Paris but our necks paid the price again!
Finally, Clive showed us a short slide show he had put together of our trip to the British Wildlife center at Lingfield. He showed pictures of the foxes, wild cats, badgers and some shots of some of our members with some added amusing captions.
So, we had a very entertaining evening with pictures from all over the world to look at and many thanks to the contributors. Sadly we ran out of time and so about three people at least including me were unable to show our stuff. Perhaps another time.