Photography Groups December Meeting

Posted on 12/12/202218/03/2023 by John Hawke

The Group met at 10:15 on 12th December with the theme ‘Portraits’.

It was again interesting to see how members interpreted the theme. All individual winners placed the emphasis on characterful faces with very few full length pictures in the mix.

Our host, Teresa Twitchell, exemplified the Christmas spirit by providing a sumptious buffet (and excellent coffee) that challenged the diabetics amongst us!

Some advice was given about how to find ‘lost’ photographs known to be on the PC’s hard drive using File Explorer and limiting the scan within a defined date window. Pam Liberson commented on the difficulty in getting local area advice from Currys and John Lewis when they tried to purchase a new printer.

John Hawke proposed a new theme for April 2023 – minimalist photographs. He explained that it was a genre that were pictures with very simple content, e.g. a single tree in a landscape, a single boat on the sea, a single flower in a vase … This meant that the group would have to carefully choose the background to create a mood/impact and to set the object within that environment for optimum composition – use of ‘Rule of Thirds’ would be useful here.

Photography November 2022 Meeting

Posted on 15/11/202217/03/2023 by John Hawke

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.

Photography Group’s Meeting October 2022

Posted on 14/10/202217/03/2023 by John Hawke

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!)