Tonight's meeting was an 'extra' one and the idea for the content came from a conversation that chairman Anne had with a member of Bognor C.C. They had obtained a DVD from the RPS and shown it one evening.
Chris obtained the necessary DVD, but the evening started with him telling us what was scheduled for next season's programme. He told us that Daisy would be handing out a questionaire at the break, asking club members what they liked and disliked about what we do as a club. I urge people who were not present tonight to get hold of one and return it to Daisy, so that the committee can set future events to suit what the majority would like to do in future seasons.
So, on with the main event. The DVD contained the chosen entries for the "RPS's International Images for Screen Exhibition" (which is posh talk for PIs!).
There were three categories, each judged by three judges, starting with 'In Camera', which was for conventional pictures of many subjects. These were watched in absolute silence and I suspect 'Awe'. There were a very large number of images in this batch from China.
The second section was for 'Altered Reality', or as I call them, 'mucked about images', and brought out a lot of comments mainly from Audrey, Alex and Peter Picthall, (who could hardly contain himself!), and which were very amusing to the rest of us. There were some amazing pictures, some still bearing some resemblance to a conventional photograph, but many others which were manipulated beyond anything that one could recognise as a photograph and some made up from countless images.
I could appreciate a few, but was totally 'turned off' by the majority. This is because I am very Unartistic and could not begin to put together stuff in a manner that would be appreciated by anyone! Our last speaker, Diana Goss, was a prime example of someone who is very artistic and who can bring together different elements to create a very clever picture.
During the tea break I had an interesting argument, (as he called it), with Peter about what constituted a photograph, and how pictures in the last batch could possibly be called photographs!
After refreshments, we went on to the last category, 'Nature', which of course I really wanted to see (and, at the same time get quite depressed, as my images fall so far short of what we saw).
One of the judges in this section was John Bebbington FRPS who I have known for many years as he was in charge of the Juniper Hall Field Studies Centre at Mickleham in Surrey, just a few hundred yards from where I lived before I came to Sussex. He was also the last Chairman of the Nature Group at the RPS. I have been on many holidays and courses with him and last year I did an Insect photography workshop with him in Shropshire.
There were many really stunning wildlife images of a wide variety of subjects created by people from all over the world, but mostly from the UK. Where appropriate, the backgrounds were clean and most of the subjects were doing something. The other thing to mention is that they have had the very minimum of corrective work. They can be sharpened, cropped and the odd blade of grass removed if necessary, but otherwise they were as they came out of the camera
I am sure we were all amazed by the majority of the images in all three categories and they have given us all plenty to think about.
To finish, as I told Peter P., once, some years ago now, I attended a Distinctions workshop run by the RPS, and the man running the event was the then Chairman of the RPS, and for his opening remark he said 'forget all the stuff you have been told by camera clubs'!