Great anticipation as we welcomed Keith Gibson from Lewes to judge this season’s opening competition. Our chair Janet Brown introduced Keith with an outline of his interests in landscape, street and architectural photography, backed up by a keen interest in hiking, travel and local atmospheric scenes.
This evening we were very happy to welcome back Paul O’Toole who has judged several of our competitions in recent times. He is Irish (there’s a surprise!?) and looks just like a shorter version of Chris Evans, but without the very recent birth of Twins. Folk who do not listen to Radio Two will not know what I am talking about.
We started off the first meeting with half the Committee members absent including two vital folk, Martin and Alex, our trusted laptop/ projector operators. Janet not only took her first meeting as Chairlady but also bravely took on the projection. This did not start well as we have a case with all the cables (about 12 of them) and three of us could not identify the correct one to connect the club laptop to the projector. After about 10 minutes we abandoned this approach and as we found a cable that connected Janet's laptop, we proceeded with plan B.
Annual General Meeting 2017-2018.
The first item on the agenda where apologies for absence from David Seddon, Daisy Kane, Martin Tomes, liz Barber, Alex Swyer, and Peter Picthall
I then started the meeting with my last job as joint Chairman - the presentation of the Cups which were won as follows:
“Best of Year” is always an evening of reckoning for our images and never more so than this time when the judge was an unknown quantity to all in the club. Don’t get me wrong – we are all very grateful to Ian Brash for stepping in at the eleventh hour due to Trevor Gellard’s ill health but Forest Gump and chocolates come to mind – “you never know what you’re gonna get”.
Before tonight's talk, we had told other clubs about our speaker, Rob White, and as result we had a room full, including 10 visitors.
Rob was introduced to us by Chris West who used to work for a company in Horsham, and Rob started there as a boy straight from school. Chris left the company, and they lost touch with each other but eventually got reunited through Facebook. (Not all bad then?)
Paul Hayward opened by whetting our appetites for the events of the evening which would see the final results for our competitions of the year. Paul then welcome Malcolm Bull judge for the evening and thanked him for this return visit and for stepping in for Ken Boddy. 24 prints were shown, with wide ranging subjects, pleasing Malcolm for quality and presentation. He held four back, which increased the anticipation.
I went to tonight's meeting expecting a talk about Eastbourne town and wondering what could possibly be of interest there. I soon found out.
The answer came when our speaker, John Staples, the President of Eastbourne Camera Club, put the title of his talk on the screen; we were going to see a selection of work from the permanent Collection of the club’s pictures collected by the speaker from various sources over a very long span of time.
Anne Nagel kindly picked me up in her car and we arrived at the Tangmere Centre Hall in good time. We went inside and were immediately told by a very nice Lady that we would not be charged entry fee, but would we please buy some raffle tickets instead. Inside the hall we found another cheerful lady selling raffle tickets with a big smile on her face. It transpired that they must have sold of good number of tickets as the Hall was pretty full, so Chichester camera club who were running the event must have done quite well we hope.
Tony Worobiec made a very welcome return to Storrington CC to encourage us with the notion “Landscape Photography – whatever the weather”. How appropriate as I sit in the warm writing this watching the rain lashing down outside – but it is a bank holiday after all.
