October’s Best of the BestNight cap by Rosemary Crumplin
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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!)