Joint Best Pictures [Click image to enlarge]

Curlew and Redshank — John Hawke

Garden Scene — Teresa Twitchell

The Group met at 10:15 on 14th November with the theme ‘Little and Large Mix’. Unfortunately our new member Lesley Wickham was too unwell to attend.
It was again interesting to see how members interpreted the theme. The penalty of having a small group with an even number led to a Joint Best Picture vote – new members please!

The next theme is ‘Portraits’. John Hawke recommended that members Google to get ideas on how to make portraits ‘pop’ – including how to avoid posing ‘mistakes, use of bokeh (blurred backgrounds to achieve a 3D quality to the subject), the importance of lighting … he also asked for at least one full profile human portrait in the four picture portfolio.

October’s Best of the BestNight cap by Rosemary Crumplin

Click on image to zoom

The Group met at 10:15 on 10th October with the theme ‘Still Life’.
It was interesting to see how members interpreted still life compositions – it was considered by many that a live parrot sitting still on its owners arm was not still life!

John Hawke proposed a change to the schedule – instead of voting for best picture/best portfolio, he suggested just voting for best picture in each portfolio and then voting for the ‘best of the best’. This would allow more names on the website slide show with the ‘best of the best’ displayed on Group News. This was agreed unanimously. Then he forgot to initiate voting for the ‘best of the best’ – a prime example of short term memory loss! This was resolved by posting all the photographs to attendees and getting votes by e-mail. The best picture voted for by most people was ‘Night Cap’ by Rosemary Crumplin.

John Clark has been having problems with his camera not taking pictures even though the image was on the screen along with the display of camera settings – it seemed that there was an intermittent shutter release fault. (a subsequent visit to Castle Cameras in Salisbury resulted in many helpful suggestions with the conclusion that the camera was not focussing on the subject)
John Hawke tried ‘focus stacking’ images on a recent trip to Devizes with AHA. The intention was to take several pictures of the same scene and use Photoshop to blend the ’stack’ of photographs to remove transient people/traffic from the scene – he found that 10 photographs in the stack were insufficient to remove transients, with ghost images remaining in the final blended picture. This prompted a discussion about focus stacking in general with special reference to its use for increasing the depth of field for macro photography. It is intended to return to this topic at the next meeting.

Theme for next meeting is ‘Little and Large Mix’. (there was considerable debate at the meeting regarding what this meant!)

Best Picture, ‘Puffin Close-up’ by John Hawke Click on image to enlarge it

The Group met at 10:15 on 8th August with the theme ‘Eye-catching Photographs’. Of the five portfolios submitted, John Hawke’s close up photograph of a Puffin was voted Best Picture. The Best Folio candidates all received one vote – John Hawke’s suggestion to add all individual best photographs from the other four folios to tha Group’s web site was unanimously agreed upon. Members talked about why they had chosen their photographs and it became clear that all photos evoked memories of past holidays and special events – there was certainly a very wide range of subjects.

Subsequent discussion centred on ways of storing photographs ranging from CDs to the Cloud. Also the current changes from camera producers in the near future with the disappearance of some SLRs in preference to mirror-less cameras as well as some manufacturers (Panasonic and Canon) abandoning the pocket camera in the wake of increased sales of Smart Phones with improved camera capabilities.

It was suggested that another field trip be organised in September – the consensus being a trip to Winchester – date to be confirmed.

Pam and Mike Liberson were ‘volunteered’ to give a short presentation at the next indoor meeting of their (2) holidays in Egypt