This week will be Portfolio night. We’ll take a look at the high-scoring images as entered, by clubs from around Scotland, to last year’s SPF Portfolio competition. Images will be provided on DVD by the Scottish Photographic Federation; commentary will be by David Hay, who is one of our most experienced members, and who has served as a SPF judge for many years.
New faces are still welcome to attend two weeks on a trial basis, to see if you’d like to join us for the season. For those who are ready to join, the online Membership Form for the season is open. The membership subscription reduces by 50% after New Year, and the £27.50 can be paid by BACS or by cheque – details are in the membership form.
As our judge for the Nan Borthwick and Peter Rourke Salver competitions we welcomed Eva Christie, local creative, reformed musician (her words!), and director of the Scottish Yarn Festival and the Scottish Wool Producers Showcase, to bring a fresh perspective on the photography of our entrants.
It is our custom to invite visiting judges to start by sharing with us a little of their own work, and Eva described her visual axes as being of colour and texture. As she talked through her impressions, and what she liked about each image, her thoughtfulness became clear.
As one of our number emailed afterwards – ” I thought Eva had done a superb job as a judge and had clearly put a lot of thought and work into the task of being a judge. It gave us a refreshing different outlook on our hobby. Well done to the Committee for getting her”.
Quite so. She’d looked — she’d really looked – at all the images. What better compliment can anyone pay to our images than to look at them?
The top picture shows Eva with Sandie and her winning entry in the Peter Rourke. And, significantly, a happy-looking audience! Winning images are, as always, posted on our galleries pages as we get them.
Next up, we have an evening of two print competitions. The Nan Borthwick Salver is for a set of three images showing a clear intention of a connecting theme of style, content or both. The Peter Rourke Salver is for prints that show photographic artistic styles.
This year we’ll be welcoming Eva Christie as our visiting judge, who will comment on our entries. Eva is a local creative with a keen eye, and is director of the Scottish Yarn Festival, so we may get a fresh perspective on our work.
New faces are still welcome to attend two weeks on a trial basis, to see if you’d like to join us for the season. For those who are ready to join, the online Membership Form for the season is open. The membership subscription reduces by 50% after New Year, and the £27.50 can be paid by BACS or by cheque – details are in the membership form.
Local photographer/ photograpy lover Des O’Neill brought in a fresh blast of inspiration last night – several dozen books about photography, carefully chosen from his even-larger collection. Charting his development in the art through the cameras he’s used and the through the books he’s bought, Des gave us a glimpse of multiple worlds of possibility, far removed from what we might think of as ‘club photography’.
More than a talk, Des gave us time with his books, to browse, perchance to dream. Above, Sandie, Sabrina and Lizzie marvel at Kirsty Mitchell’s lavish ‘Wonderland’.
We saw Vivian Maier, Martin Parr, Don McCullin, Sebastiao Salgado, Ciarán Og Arnold, Julia Margaret Cameron (and heard the story of the two copies, thanks to the tea cup and the intervening bat!), and so many more. We had time to compare notes, and get a little lost in our own thoughts too. If we had our own premises we might have a small lending library. Anyone got thoughts on setting up something up anyway?
Below, Jimmy, Roben, Bob and Ian find themselves captivated.
Local photographer Des O’Neill has a huge and varied collection of books on photography that he’s compiled over many years. He’ll tell us about some of them, including, perhaps, the one about Sebastião Salgado’s ‘Gold’, about the gold-rush mine in the Brazilian jungle in the 1980’s. And maybe the one about Julia Margaret Cameron (1815-1879), pictured here, who is credited with producing the first close-up portraits in the history of the medium.
New faces are still welcome to attend two weeks on a trial basis, to see if you’d like to join us for the season. For those who are ready to join, the online Membership Form for the season is open. The membership subscription reduces by 50% after New Year, and the £27.50 can be paid by BACS or by cheque – details are in the membership form.
Last night was a workshop-ish, looking at what can be done when processing digital images with several different software packages. The aim was to help we members think about what what’s possible, about what we’re using right now, and about how we might want to move forward.
We looked at a selection of apps, from free software you can use on a phone or tablet (Snapseed), through to industry-standard desktop tools favoured by enthusiasts and professionals(Lightroom, Photoshop), with a look at some of the creative possibilities of artificial intelligence (Luminar AI) on the way.
Our panel of ‘test drivers’ put the apps through their paces, editing a selection of digital images. Tim, above, worked with Luminar AI on Ian’s snowy peak image. Graham, below, pointing a finger at his tablet running Snapseed, produced a multiple exposure combining three images he’d taken earlier in the evening. Ian and Wol took turns too, with Photoshop and Lightroom respectively.
Spending only 10 minutes on each image, we barely scratched the surface of the ‘how to …’, but we may have started to explore the ‘why’.
230118 Last night – Levels of Digital Processing: Graham Robb
This week will be a workshop night, and we’ll be looking at what can be done when processing digital images with several different software packages. The aim is to help us members think about what what’s possible, about what we’re using right now, and about how we might want to move forward. We may manage to explain some terminology along the way.
We’ll be looking at a wide range of apps, from free software you can use on a phone or tablet, through to industry-standard desktop tools favoured by enthusiasts and professionals.
It promises to be a lively evening, with a panel of ‘test drivers’ putting the apps through their paces, 10 minutes at a time, editing a selection of digital images, and with plenty of time for questions and discussion.
New faces are still welcome to attend two weeks on a trial basis, to see if you’d like to join us for the season. For those who are ready to join, the online Membership Form for the season is open. The membership subscription reduces by 50% after New Year, and the £27.50 can be paid by BACS or by cheque – details are in the membership form.
We had a cracking field of entries for the Grant Cup, with 51 images from 17 members. Four of these entrants are in their first season of PPS competitions, so special congratulatons to them. We don’t have space here to show them all – you really had to be there – but It should be clear, even from these wee thumbnails, what a high standard of images this event attracted.
The Grant Cup is themed, and this year the theme was ‘Transient’, not that we hold anyone too closely to that. We watched the entries through several times, noting our favourites with paper and pencil. This year, to cast our votes, we used the online voting process we used for the two years we met on Zoom. This turned out to be beneficial, and we’ll use it again, for the Dall and Simpson Cups – the online scoring not only quickly counts votes cast, but simultaneously counts how many 5’s, how many 4’s, and so on, which becomes significant in the event of a tie on overall points. So it proved to be – the top two images both scored equally highly, but one had attracted more 5’s, and so had the edge.
The top five placed images can be seen on our Gallery page for the season’s competition winners.
Happy New Year! We start back after the break with a real treat – the Grant Cup competition. It’s for digital images, up to three per person. It’s themed – this year’s theme is ‘Transient’. And it’s judged by the members present. So, no learned commentary from an external judge this time, just us, looking at all the entries a couple of times, then casting our votes to identify the top crowd-pleasers. Don’t miss what promises to be a great evening. Bring your own pencil.
New faces are still welcome to attend two weeks on a trial basis, to see if you’d like to join us for the season. For those who are ready to join, the online Membership Form for the season is open. The membership subscription reduces by 50% after New Year, and the £27.50 can be paid by BACS or by cheque – details are in the membership form.
Last night, another evening of insight from our own ranks, as we were treated to four speakers sharing their images and skills.
John Boyd’s title, Home Training Ground, referred to the daily practise that helps us get familiar with our camera and what it can do. Satisfying images can be hard to come by when we’re struggling with our gear. On the other hand, cultivating a habit of taking photos every day helps us get to the point when the camera becomes an extension of our eye, and it’s no longer an effort to think about which settings to use. Illustrating his message with scenes from his daily dog-wallks, John has set us a challenge – to take daily images in December, and bring the best ten to share at the next Members’ Night.
Dave Moran showed us how to make an audiovisual presentation, a self-running slideshow of images with a soundtrack, perhaps to tell a story or set a mood in a way that’s a little different from a single image. His hands-on demo used PTE software (it stands for Pictures To Exec), available for Windows and Mac. There are other products, based on similar principles, offering a variety of features. Dave’s timing is spot on – an AV does take a bit of planning; our annual Simpson Cup is contested in March; and we now have four weeks off over Christmas to get organised.
Tom Ryan’s Photographing Birds in Flight suggested that, to capture striking images of small things that are both distant and fast-moving, it can be helpful to turn our back on manual settings, and instead let a modern high-end camera take a lot of the guesswork and luck out of the process. With examples from four days out over the summer, Tom showed us what’s possible, and how freeing ourselves from the technicalities lets us concentrate on the feeling we’re seeking to convey.
Finally, David Hay shared a series of images from his local walks around Pitlochry, taken during the time when local walks were the order of the day. These showed the great variety of autumn colours on the trees, mists hanging above the Tay, the way the sunlight refracts through the dewdrops – so many of nature’s wonders can be found not far from our doorsteps, even if we live in the town. David tells us that these were taken on a lightweight consumer-level camera with a plastic lens – no high-end megabuck pro gear here. But, to come back to John’s message at the start of the evening, his eye is trained by many years of daily practise.
