Thanks to Francis for his presentation about how to Improve your Photography by Using Simple Camera Settings and Techniques. For those who missed the meeting, or anybody who wants an on-screen version of the handouts, the PDF can be downloaded here.
March Meeting
Unfortunately, the Baptist Church remains unavailable for our March meeting. This is upsetting because we have already advertised the meeting as an introductory evening for new members. We are searching for a new venue, and will publicise it here (and at the door of the Baptist’s on Monday) as soon as we find one.
The assignment for April follows the introductory theme: take pictures with basic equipment – compact or phone cameras.
Adobe Lightroom Beta
For those of us interested in editing our photographs, maybe thinking of moving past Google’s excellent and free Picasa but not quite up to spending £550 for a copy of Photoshop, Adobe do have 2 more reasonably priced programs: Lightroom and Elements. These both have 30 day free trials, and are worth looking at.
Lightroom is currently on version 3, but version 4 is about to be released (in March) and until then you can download the Beta version for free here. That’s a great opportunity to play with it without spending any money.
Change of Plans
Unfortunately, the New Members Evening scheduled for February 20th has had to be postponed until March 19th because of building work at the Baptist Church.
We have yet to finalise revised plans for the February meeting. We will probably, of necessity, arrange some kind of Field Trip – possibly involving beer. Watch this site for updates.
Afghan Girl: Before & After
Last month, Adrian gave us a presentation on the work of professional photographer Steve McCurry. He is most famous for the National Geographic cover picture of a 12 year old young refugee in Afghanistan, known only as “Afghan Girl”, and memorable for her striking eyes as she stares at us from the image.
Tying in nicely with this month’s assignment is this article (from 2002) describing how she was finally tracked down. Here are the Before and After pictures which Steve McCurry took when he went back after 17 years for a new portrait:
Photo File Names
We decided at the last meeting that it would be very useful when showing photographs if everybody names their files consistently.
The format is NAME TITLE NUMBER where TITLE is the assignment title:
e.g. John Smith Autumn Colours 1.jpg
We also thought that it would be simpler if the photos collected and shown at the meeting were posted to a gallery on the website by me. To keep things manageable, only your first 3 numbered photos will be added to the gallery – so bear that in mind when numbering.
If you don’t want some (or any) of your photographs on display, please indicate in the file name by adding NOSHOW or something similar after the number:
e.g. John Smith Autumn Colours 3 noshow.jpg
Photomicrography
If last month’s meeting fired up your taste for photographing small things, then take a look at the winners in this year’s Nikon Small World Photomicrography competition. Some genuinely specialist and expensive kit needed for these pictures, I suspect!
Macro Photography
Francis has given me a tutorial on Macro Photography which you can download here. It is a 40MB file, so it could take a few seconds to download depending on your broadband. It is also password protected – but you should have received the password in an email from Chris.
Knight Photography
In October, Stephen talked to us about night photography. He has made available the notes and illustrations he used which you can view or download here: (K)Night Photography in PDF format.
Portrait Shoots
I hope you all enjoyed and learned something during the Portrait Shoot Session.
Thanks again to Francis & Stephen for presenting and bringing all the kit.
The handout is available to download and some pictures have been uploaded to the December gallery page.