Our great friend Leslie Cutting visited us again tonight to give us some more Adobe Photoshop tuition. Leslie uses Elements 12 which is usually considered the best editing programme for photographers. Photoshop CC is a more comprehensive alternative. but it now requires a monthly subscription of nearly £9, and is not available unless you have had CS 6 or maybe some earlier versions of CS. I do not believe that it gives photographers very much more than Elements anyway.
Thursday saw thelast PI competition, and it was a hard fought one. Marks varied from 12 to 20, with seventeen being held back. The judge John Bradshaw showed us a few of his wonderful images first: he likes to try and replicate 19th century darkroom techniques digitally, also working on projects such as following the Greenwich meridian across the UK.
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.
Five of us gathered yesterday for theSussex Federation Photographic Competition. We met at a new venue, The Kings Centre Burgess Hill, and also on a new day a Saturday. I am not sure if the change of day had an effect on the attendance generally or not, but I felt there were fewer people than last year when it was clear we had out grown Wivelsfield Village Hall. The Kings Centre can hold 500 people.
This evening we were treated to a show of superb artistic talent by Diana Goss MSc UKCP ARPS who specialises and thoroughly enjoys Night Photography. She was going to be accompanied by a gentleman who partners on her night adventures, but unfortunately he was unable to attend. Diana emphasised that for personal safety it is unwise to venture out alone at night and in any case her partner works with her (and sometimes with more assistants as well) to enable her to get the results she is seeking.
We arrived at Lancing Parish Hall for the Crouch Shield PI competition which was hosted by Worthing CC. We paid, bought raffle tickets, as you do, and had a large 'goody bag' thrust upon us containing Olympus catalogues, a very useful lens polishing cloth and very luckily a pen, since I immediately found out that my own pen had expired. We then met up with fellow SCC supporters, I counted eleven, and sat down.
There was a good number of entriesto this set subject, and a very high standard of varied images. Most were black and whites, but there were a few sepias, although one of mine was a “false orangey colour” in our judge’s words, so take care out there next time round! The main advice was to think whether the toning added or subtracted from the image. With just a couple of the entries, he would have liked to see the colour version, as he felt that converting to black and white doesn’t always work.
This evening we had our second 'Knockout' competition devised and run by John Gauvin, ably assisted by Alex. Last season we had our first similar competition using prints from everyone entering. This time it was three PIs and 69 were entered. Two images were projected side by side on the screen and we voted with a show of hands with our choice of the best image. Alex counted the votes and if there were an equal number of votes for each image, Alex settled the result with the toss of a coin,(a £1 before the break and a 5p after_ the tea must have cost a lot!)
I always look forward to having these SCPF P.I. competition rounds held at our venue, because one can get nice and close to the images and hear exactly what the judge is saying, where as if similar comps are held in their usual necessary big halls you can miss quite a lot sometimes.
Martin gave us a talk on last year’s 'One a Week’ project which a number of us took part in during 2013. The idea is that you are given a new topic each week and you must take at least one image of the subject during that week, which you then upload to the Flickr site. Once there, your fellow members of the group can tell you what they think of your efforts. If you get no comments, as happened with most of my shots, you can take it that nobody thinks them worthy of comment! Not good, but in my case predictable.
