Category Archives: News

This week is our last members’ night of the season. Following his Home Training Ground presentation earlier in the season, John Boyd has been hot-housing some of our newer members with monthly challenges to stretch their camera handling, and their processing of images using Adobe Lightroom. 

Lizzie, Alastair and Paul will share their progress, with: manual settings; shallow depth of field; high contrast images; the notion of motion. 

To finish, John will show some mono digitals and prints to stimulate conversation, comments and advice, on the taking, processing and printing of Black and White images.

http://www.perthshirephotographicsociety.org.uk/2022/06/programme-2022-23/#15-march-2023

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.

You really had to be there. Not just for the Selfies, and the AV’s, but to marvel at David regaling LIzzie and Vicky with whatever out at the tea table. Thank you, tea team, for keeping us going.

Meanwhile, back in the hall, the Selfie competition entries have been shown, and people are casting their votes on our online voting form, which calculates the scores and the placings while we enjoy chat over tea and biscuits. And later, in the dark, the voting on the AVs too. Congratulations to all our entrants for such creativity.

The winning entries are over on this year’s Gallery page. The Top 5 Selfies are there. The top AVs are all listed too, and some will even play. If an AV doesn’t play, it’s because it’s got copyright music on, and we can’t share it online. Which brings us back to the first paragraph – you really had to be there.

This week sees our final two competitions of the season, each designed to stretch our creativity in different directions. The Dall Cup is for selfies, and the Simpson Cup is for audio-visual presentations. 

They’re both judged by the members present. So, no learned commentary from an external judge this time, just us, looking at all the entries, then casting our votes to identify the top crowd-pleasers. Don’t miss what promises to be a fun evening – even though none of our entrants have done anything quite like this! Bring your own pen or pencil.

http://www.perthshirephotographicsociety.org.uk/2022/06/programme-2022-23/#08-march-2023

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.

There was something of a ‘planning’ theme running through last night’s meeting. From Ian and Roy make sure of getting the slideshows set up beforehand, and Ian then giving us an outline of the programme for the coming weeks.

Roy’s tale was of a trip that was planned as one thing, but which turned out to be quite another. To Australia and New Zealand to visit family and tour the sights – sounds straightforward enough. But in hindsight, early 2020 wasn’t the best time to go, and the plans were disrupted by Covid lockdown in a foreign country, and a lot of re-planning to get home at all.

During his extended stay, in a small town in North Island, it was the morning photo walks that gave Roy a sense of normality.

The strong narrative thread through Roy’s presentation gave a sense of the benefit of starting out with a plan, and being prepared to adapt it to suit changing circumstances.

Next up is our last Speaker’s Night of the season, and we will be welcoming Roy Robertson from Dundee PS. Roy has judged for us several times in recent years, which is quite telling in itself. This time he’s with us as a speaker, and his title is ‘New visions of New Zealand’. The supporting image he gave us at the start of the season, for our Programme page, is as mysterious now as it was then. This should be a great evening.  

http://www.perthshirephotographicsociety.org.uk/2022/06/programme-2022-23/#01-march-2023

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.

For the Colour Rosebowl competition we hosted Andy Hayes as judge. He started out by describing role being more as a ‘reviewer’ than a ‘judge’, and proceeded to review our 36 prints with perception and generosity. Over the course of of the evening, he fleshed out his comments about our own entries in particular with broader advice about the art and science of printing in general.

Take care with monitor brightness, and calibrate your monitor if you can (PPS has a calibrator for members’ use). Choose your paper to show your subject to best advantage. If possible, select a printing profile to suit the specific combination of printer and paper. Bigger prints aren’t always best, and a small print in a mount can look wonderful. Tidy mounts matter, as does the placement of the aperture in the board, to support the print both artistically and structurally.

To illustrate his point about paper choice, Andy had brought along five prints, being the exact same image (lions in a tree) printed on five different types of paper – gloss, semi gloss, metallic pearl, fine art, and matt – and these attracted great interest in the tea break.

The comments from members afterwards were enthusiastic – we’d not only had an evening enjoying each others prints, with expert commentary, but we’d learned some very practical tips on how to make our prints even more impactful.

This week will see us enjoying the last internal Print competition of the season, the Colour Rosebowl. It’s for up to three prints per member, and the subject matter and treatment is left to the author’s choosing. 

Our visiting SPF udge will be Andy Hayes from Fettercairn, on what we think is probably his first visit to PPS. Andy has a particular interest in conservation photography, in support of protecting the wildlife of the Cairngorms and beyond.

http://www.perthshirephotographicsociety.org.uk/2022/06/programme-2022-23/#22-february-2023

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.

Another Members’ Night last night, and another evening upstairs in the Sandeman Room. The presenters get to sit if they wish; we get to see the images on the large-screen telly rather than projected; and we get to sit closer to both the images and to each other. All of this works to the benefit of the evening for those who come, and yesterday we were so many we had to fetch extra chairs.

We had a chance to hear from two of us who joined this year. David Allan gave an overview of his ’50 years, but not counting’ photographic journey, from a Zenit 35mm wih no film in, to a modern digital, with a consistent sense of fun. Bob Bain showed us what he’s been doing to capture images of wildlife with varying numbers of legs – birds, mammals, butterflies and spiders, and even some fish.

We also heard from Tom Ryan speaking about some of the legal and ethical aspects of street photography, taking photographs of people unawares, and the gradations between public and private spaces. And after the break, David Hay wowed us with more of his images, this time from winter walks near his home in snow, frost and mist. Some of the conditions he captured lasted mere minutes. His motto last night – ‘when in doubt, go out’.

This week will be a Members’ Night, with four speakers from our midst 

• David Allan – 50 years, but not counting
• Bob Bain – The Wildlife around us
• David Hay – Winter photography – more seasonal images taken during lockdown
• Tom Ryan – Street Photography – What are the legal and ethical issues around taking pictures of people in public places?

http://www.perthshirephotographicsociety.org.uk/2022/06/programme-2022-23/#15-february-2023

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.

The SPF Portfolio competition is held each autumn, and images are rated as 2, 3, 4 or 5 by each of 3 judges, giving a range of scores from 6 to 15. Afterwards, each participating club is sent DVD with a slideshow of the ‘accepted’ entries – those scoring 11 or more. And each year, our very own David Hay talks us through the show, pointing out emerging trends, creative flourishes, un-noticed errors, and insights into ‘the making of’ many of the images.

We looked at the Mono acceptances before tea, which featured four PPS images: Omar – Me and my shadow; Sandie – Boy on the bike; Wol – Sound of sunshine; Tim – Wailing widow falls.

And after tea, we looked at the Colour ones, including PPS images from: Annette – Ice bird; John – Mountain hare; Omar – Skye 2; Omar – Skye 3; Tom – Tokyo train trip lady; Ian – Lighting up time at kirkjufell; Hillary – Loch Linhie rain squall; Tom – Tokyo skyscrapers.

How did we get so many acceptance? In part because our images are good. And in part because we entered a lot of them – over 75 – curated in a wee Facebook group we set up for the purpose. This let all the authors get some peer-review input, to improve the learning all round, and to select images with a good chance of doing well.