British Wildlife Photography Awards 2014

BWPA logo

Your chance to win a prestigious award, with a cash prize of £5,000 and reach millions through national exposure. Help raise awareness about British wildlife and celebrate our natural heritage.

See the website for details. Closing date is 3rd May 2014.

New Format Competition

Starting from the March meeting, the new competition will be:

Your Favourite Photo

Your single monthly entry must be submitted as a 6×4 print of a photograph which you have taken in the previous 6 months.

The monthly winner will be decided by the blind voting system which we have been using. At the end of the year, in December, all the monthly winners will be put together and an overall winner will be chosen by our judges, Francis and Stephen.

The overall winner will win a prize: 6 months free membership.

 

the hours

You’ve probably heard about 365projects, where you take a picture a day for a year. I’ve done it twice now, and I’m taking a break, although I do miss it a little. If that seems a little daunting, here’s another idea for photo inspiration: thehours.

This website is a collective project in which a group of photographers, who met on Flickr, each post a single image every month, taken during a particular hour of the day. We’re starting in January 2014 with 7am (so images posted that month will be taken between 7am and 8am) and then moving through the day by an hour each month.

There’s no need to publish your photos, although there is a Flickr group associated with thehours website if you want to join in.

Newsletter

The current gang of four – Tony, Fred, Symon and Anita – have just finished a year of duty. As there were no offers of a new gang of four we are all willing to carry on for the next 6 months.

We had our group meeting to discus the next 6 months, both Francis and Stephen attended as well as Chris and Andrew. We hope that we have set you some interesting and challenging subjects. These may be tweaked a little as we have asked a couple of visitors to talk to us about their work.

Exhibition News
I’m sure you will all agree what a great exhibition we had this year. It was our 4th exhibition and the photos that were on display were a very high standard indeed. We have discussed having another exhibition in the spring – the dates we have set aside for this are April 12 & 13 2014.

Please give us your views on having a Spring Exhibition.

Field Trips and Workshops
We are currently looking into different field trips & workshops. We feel there is an opening here for another member of the club. It has been suggested that if we knew what was coming up in other villages/towns then we could organise our own field trip.

We are looking for a member who could research events and send them off to Derek who could put them onto our website. If this is something you may be interested in then please do talk to one of us.

A Few “Thank Yous”
We would like to thank you, the members, for supporting your club and contributing to each assignment.

A big thank you to Derek who updates our website and keeps it running; also to Colin who each month supplies the Willingham News with our subject of the month.

We would also like to say a very big thank you for the support and advice that Francis and Stephen gives each and every club member.

Agenda
The events section shows the dates and subjects for the next six months. Please remember it’s your interpretation of the subjects, however abstract that might be.

Please may we also remind you that you should only supply 3 images for each subject matter, not forgetting to label them with your name, subject & number (1,2,3).

Our new print competition for 2014 is: Select a photograph from Google Images or Flickr, then recompose and photograph as your own. You must show the original & yours, 6×4 prints only.

We haven’t forgotten about our green screen photography, would you like this to be a non-club Monday night?

Anita

CEN Photographer of the Year

I did enter for this competition – but failed miserably!

However, this link to the slideshow of winning photographs might be of interest to club members. Certainly a very different take in some cases, and an exercise in Photoshop in others.

Colin Brown

Adobe Offer

I know that many of our members use Adobe Photoshop. I personally use Lightroom and Elements but I was considering upgrading. Adobe want their customers to switch to their subscription product called Creative Cloud which gives you access to all of their tools for a monthly fee – but quite a large one!

They have just announced Creative Cloud Photoshop Photography. This gives you Photoshop CC and Lightroom 5 (plus some online storage and website publishing facilities) for £8.78/month (£105.36/year). This compares with the price of £102.57 for Lightroom 5 and a monthly fee for Photoshop of £17.58 (they really don’t want you to buy Photoshop outright anymore).

Here’s the link for more about CC Photoshop Photography. Sadly, they do not offer commission.

This price is only available until December 2nd 2013. I don’t know what the price will be after that.

Composition Rules

The notes from Francis’ presentation on Composition are sadly too large to post directly on the site, but can be downloaded from Google Drive via this link.

Talk: From silver print to digital photography

As part of the Cambridge Festival of Ideas, there is a talk about photography in Cambridge on Saturday 2nd November, from 2pm to 3pm.

Photography was an amazing concept when it was invented in the 1830s, enabling clear moments to be captured forever and teaching us so much about history. But now digital technology blurs the boundaries between past and future, and once again creates a new concept for photography. Explore this fascinating concept and question its limits at this talk as part of the Cambridge Festival of Ideas.

Festiva Of Ideas

See the Alliance Française website for details.

Super-Secret Spy Lens

After tonight’s viewing of the Street Photography assignment, I showed you my right-angle mirror lens. This can be very useful for candid street shots. I got it from an entertaining US website called PhotoJojo which sells lots of oddball camera related stuff.

Anyway, here it is:

The Spy Lens is available at the Photojojo Store.

Exhibition Comments

Comments from this year’s exhibition.

Very informative thank you.

Beautiful display.

Some lovely photos.

Absolutely stunning works.

Really interesting – particularly liked the sunsets and the steam engine.

Inspiring thank you.

A very high standard of photography.

What a wonderful exhibition for a village club to have, well done.

Really interesting exhibition, we enjoyed it very much.

Beautifully displayed, with a wide variety.

Excellent, wide range.

Great mix of work and very interesting to hear about the club.

Great photos! I will definitely rejoin the club, you should organise exhibitions more often.

Very inspirational, has encouraged me to take more photos, thank you.

A lovely show of photos.

Fascinating and diverse range of photos, was a pleasure and an honour to see them.

An excellent display of photographs, very enjoyable viewing.

Such awesome talent in Willingham, amazing.

Beautiful work.

Didn’t think it could get any better than last year but shows how wrong I can be.

Very impressive.

Wow! What talent!