Hi Everyone,

Last Thursday Nick Allen did a presentation on lighting.  If you weren’t able to attend, you missed an excellent program.  Nick has a stellar background in film and lighting and put together a very informative program that enhanced every attendee’s knowledge of lighting, its properties and uses. Thank you, Nick, for taking the time to put together such an interesting and well thought out program.  

You should have received an email looking for a volunteer to help Kevin as the Judges chair.  As you know one of the main priorities of our club is competition night and we are always in search of judges to critique our images.  This doesn’t happen automatically, someone has to contact a judge and set up a date for them to review our images.  It doesn’t take much work, but it does take a little bit of time to locate and contact a judge and set up a date for their appearance.  Please contact me or Kevin if you can assist with this very important part of our club activity.  

Speaking of competition, we have a committee that reviews all the images that are submitted in a competition.  The committee members review the image to insure they meet the standards for the specific category.  We occasionally miss something, but we try to insure the image is in the correct category and has only the amount of post processing that is allowed in that specific category.  In Pictorial pretty much anything goes, but for the other categories, such as Journalism and Nature, there are very specific rules.  Please review these rules before you upload an image into the competition.  I have made the mistake myself and need to check the rules again and again.  Please help us out and save our volunteer members time so they don’t have to contact you to ask what you did to an image or ask you to move it to another category.  

Before I go, we do need another volunteer to be a back up projectionist. We want to make sure that if our projectionist wants to take a vacation and go out of town there is someone to take his/her place.  We need to make sure someone is available every month for the competition nights.   If you can help us out here please let me know. The club doesn’t operate automatically, it takes members to make things work.  This is yourclub, please take part to continue to make it a club we can all be proud of belonging to.  

Lastly, I have attached a chart to the end of this message so you can see the participation in each competition category.  As you will see Pictorial always had the largest number of images submitted.  The other categories can be challenging but we don’t learn if we don’t do.  So, challenge yourself to learn to take Journalism, Creative and Nature images.  Then enter them into the competition to get feedback on how to improve your photography.  That is why we are all here.  That is it for now, go out and start shooting.  

Mike

Hi Everyone,

Just a reminder we have a great field trip planned by Joel and Trisha to the Legion of Honor on March 30^th.  The group will meet up at 9:30 AM in the parking lot.  There should be no shortage of photographic opportunities for you.  I look forward to seeing the images you come back with.  Another field trip reminder is the Bodie trip in June, don’t forget to make lodging reservations soon, as the towns around there fill up quickly at that time of year.  

Dick Weston and Phil Hann have volunteered to put on 4-6 classes on working with Layers in Photoshop.  When I asked at the last meeting if anyone was interested in learning Layers, there was a very positive response.  I know I can certainly use any Photoshop learning opportunity.  The lessons will most likely be held prior to our regular meetings, and more information on that will be forthcoming as Dick and Phil finalize their presentation.  We are looking to start this in May.  Dick and Phil have done these in the past and have been very well received.  

Our last competition with the Silverman’s as our judges was a great deal of fun. If you attended, you may have very well walked away with one of the many raffle prizes they brought for our members. As usual, the suggestions given on our images were spot on, and occasionally a comment brought a good laugh. I always look forward to their commentary.  I was fortunate to have won the Best in Show competition at the end of the evening with my Fisherman at Sunrise image.  Thank you very much Susan and Neil.  In addition to the raffle prizes they gave out, they also donated a Datacolor Spyder Express monitor calibration device to the club.  As the club had recently purchased a new Datacolor device for our computer, this one may very well be a prize at the end of the year.  The Board will get together to decide the best way to utilize this very generous donation to our club. If you have an idea for how we best utilize this device, please let me know and I will pass your suggestion on to the board.  

I don’t know about you, but I like to learn with visual lessons.  I have attended several photographic workshops but most of the time I learn from various YouTube photographic channels.    I learned Lightroom from Anthony Morganti and several others.  If you are a Canon shooter and like to photograph birds Tim Boyer has an excellent channel.  I find that Jamie Windsor really gives me something to think about when I watch his channel.  There are probably 15 YouTubers I follow that specialize in photography.  If you have a favorite channel let me know so I can share it with our members.  

Lastly, if you have an idea, or something we can all learn from, please share it with us.  I know we have members that share various programs or shows they have linked to our Facebook page.  There is so much wonderful content out there and we can’t all possibly see it or remember it all.  Please send me a link, or an article and I will see it gets shared with our members. At the end of the day we are all in this for enjoyment and learning.  So, get out there and take some shots.  

Mike

mdfunk@comcast.net