Chris thanked Phil for a great practical evening a couple of weeks ago on taking macro photos. At that event the caps from Colin’s extension tubes disappeared, can you please check your camera bags for them? Phil was also to be the guest judge for the macro photo for this evening. The menu for the Christmas meal has been circulated. Can you please let Joni have your menu choices and money no later than the next meeting on 1st December.

We then had a fairly long discussion about the judging of the monthly photo competitions. The following tweaks to the system will be implemented with immediate effect. All photos will be displayed on the tables at the start of the meeting and everyone will have a chance to view them WITHOUT comment. After the viewing the judge for the evening will collect all the photos and he will put up the winning photo in each section as the first image to be displayed in each section. Discussion / critique of the photos will then take place and the need for anonymity of each photos author will then not be required so a two way dialog on each of the photos can take place.

There was then a discussion about the selection of photos for our external competitions. No changes to the existing sytsem of selection were made.

After the Bank Holiday on 1st November many of the cemeteries have stunning displays of flowers that are worth photographing according to Chris.

Steve recommended visiting the V&A website and also the museum to see their great collections of photographs.

The competition against Alton Camera Club is scheduled for January. So, please let Colin have 5 of your best 800 x 600 images by email ASAP and in any case by 30th November please.

The judging of the large entry of macro shots then took place and with the discussions that took place we started to run out of time. The winner of the advanced section was Ulrich with his image of a fly and Felicity was Highly Commended for her image. The winner of the intermediate section was Mark with his image of a Flower and Bee, this could well be Mark’s last win in this section as he will probably be moving up to the advanced section shortly. (Awaiting Tess’s confirmation).

As a result of the time being limited Steve only had a chance for about 5 minutes on Night Photography. The practical evening on 17th November will commence at 7pm outside Bar Esquina in Javea Port. Steve advised people to bring tripods and remote shutter releases if they have them for this evening. (If you have an ND or Polarising filter they may also be useful too). Steve will cover some more practical tips about taking night photos on the evening as well.

We then had a guest speaker that Steve had arranged a professional photographer Rogier Scholte who specialises in time lapse photography. His website is currently under construction but has some interesting bits on it including the video that he has done for Moraira town hall. Rogier showed us some of his videos and covered how he edits them and also some recommendations about length of video etc. It was a very interesting talk and certainly is something that I want to have a go at. There is an instructional video about Time Lapse photography on You Tube by Gavin Hoey that is very good too. The necessary timer remotes are available on eBay for around £13 and with Christmas coming may be a suitable present to request from your family.

Next months competition subject is Night Shots.

Don’t forget this photo should be a recent one taken in the last 2 months.

We covered the usual business of the evening with Chris talking about the Bangor competition and the successful World Wide Photo Walk in Ondara. Chris then told the meeting that he had put his house up for sale and that he and Tess would return to the UK once his property sold, to that end he suggested that we think about electing a new President and Secretary / Treasurer at the AGM in January. We had a discussion about the Christmas meal and Joni has booked La Cocina again for this year and after a vote it was decided that we would eat from the ‘Christmas Menu’. Joni will distribute the menu shortly for everyone to see and chose from. Colin mentioned the Light It magazine available for Apple iPad’s and recommended it, as did Ulrich, and also recommended membership of the 500px website.

We then looked at the entries for the monthly competition Open (places) and Chris was this months judge. In the intermediate section Joni was the winner with her photo of the beach at Sitges. The advanced winner challenged Chris and in the end he chose Ulrich’s photo of  the Castle at Moro de Rubielos and he highly commended Colin’s photo of Moraira and Peter and Anna’s photos of Valencia. As Joni has now won the intermediate class 3 times she will in future be competing in the Advanced section. Congratulations to Joni.

After the raffle the second half of the evening was devoted to a talk about macro photography by Phil. Lots of excellent macro photos were shown as well as suggested equipment and methods of capturing sharp macro photographs. Phil will be conducting a practical evening of macro photography as the theme for the tutorial evening on 20th October. Please attend with suitable camera and lens and if you don’t have the necessary equipment Phil will lend you some of his but you will need a memory card / stick to take your photos home with you. The meeting finished at 9.30 and we adjourned to the bar opposite.

November competition theme – Macro

Don’t forget your macro photo should have been taken in the last 2 months.

The meeting started with Chris’s usual updates and with several apologies as some members were still away. We have purchased a new projector and sold the old one to one of our members. Chris went through the minutes from the recent committee meeting the important points were

• Syllabus until March 2011 has been provisionally agreed.
• Membership subscriptions for 2012 will revert to €20 for adults and €10 for juniors. We will retain the €10 new member joining fee.
• Images for competitions will in future be selected by the three club judges, Chris Steve & Colin, rather than the full committee in future. This should speed up the selection process.
• A new annual prize will be presented at the annual Christmas meal. This will be the ‘President’s Choice Award’ it will be given to the best photo selected by the President from those in that years galleries on the website. If your photo is not on the website it will not be included in the president’s deliberations. The prize will be a professionally printed and framed copy of the winning photograph.
• We will have prizes for the usual Print of the Year competition in January, one for intermediate and one for advanced.
• Joni will again organise the Christmas meal.
• Chris & Tess will negotiate with the Town Hall for our use of the meeting room for 2012.

Colin covered a few points

• There are still some places available on the Ondara Photowalk on 1st October. This is part of the World Wide Photowalk organised for this day. More details here.
• An excellent new book is available on compositing in Photoshop CS5 called Photoshop Compositing Secrets by Matt Kosklowski. It is available for about £17 from Amazon here.
• Colin has a Sigma 17-70 Canon lens for sale if anyone is interested.
• The themes for the Bangor competition are : Portrait, Landscape, Fine Art, Still Life, Sport, Travel, Glamour & Fashion, Open, Nature. Please send your entries for each of these themes 4 max per theme, sized 800×600, named theme number by name so Portrait1 by Fred Smith, no later than 30th September. The competition entries will be selected early the following week.

Phil has a MAC copy of Photoshop Elements 8 for sale. Sealed original with serial number. Please note that this is MAC only not Windows.

We then had the judging of the photos taken at the Denia Marina walk in July. Steve was the judge as he was celebrating his birthday that day and so didn’t participate and this allowed Chris and Colin to enter photos. Due to members being away there weren’t that many entered for judging unfortunately. The winner of the intermediate section was Joni with her photo of the Denia walkway. The winner of the advanced section was Colin with his Black and White image of a carved head.

We then made good use of the new projector with a slideshow presentation by Chris of the ‘World Press Photographer of the year 2011′ winning entries. There were some great photos but unfortunately many of them were depressing. As we had a bit of time left Chris then showed us another slideshow of the exhibits in some of the Galleries in Madrid that he had visited in the summer.

We concluded the meeting and then adjourned to the bar opposite.

Next Months Competition Theme – Open but restricted to ‘Places’.

This months news will be a little brief as I didn’t make the meeting as I was away.

The competition subject was ‘Action’ and Steve was the judge as I was away. The winner of the advanced section was Chris with his photo of a horse, Eve and Ulrich received Highly Commended  for their photos. In the intermediate section the winner was Felicity with her Bull photo (welcome to the Advanced section) and the joint entry by Nichole & Simone and Joni’s photos were both ‘Highly Commended’.

After the usual raffle Peter gave a talk on High Key photography and showed a video. To help everyone with their ‘High Key’ entries for next months competition Steve will be bringing his lighting and a model to the tutorial evening on the 19th May. This will allow those who want to to make use of his high key background and lighting to get some shots. Please let Tess know if you want to take part in this activity on the tutorial evening.

That’s it for this time other than to say I have come across a good website that lists the Fiestas that are occurring in Spain on a given day. The website is at fiestas.net

Sorry for the late publishing of the new this month but it has been really busy for me and I am afraid I just forgot to do it.

The theme for this month was Still Life following on from Ulrich’s talk last month. There was a bumper selection of entries and the judge this month was Chris. He selected Ulrich’s photo of bottles and chillie peppers as the winner in the advanced section and Greet’s photo of  fish on a net won the intermediate section. Chris also awarded two Highly Commended’s to Phil Cousins and Mike Blower.

After the judging and critique session Steve chaired an Open Forum where we discussed all things "Action" and that is the theme for the May competition.

The theme for the June Competition is High Key and this will be the subject of next months talk by Peter Tomlin.

We had some visitors this month from the U3A Teulada Moraira U3A camera club who wanted to see how we organise the club. We had the usual business to start the evening off and everyone was reminded not to bring drinks up to the meeting room until after the mid meeting break so as to not run the risk of damaging prints. Everyone was reminded that for the themed competitions the photographs MUST have been taken in the preceeding 2 months to the competition. Any photographs found to have been taken outside this time period will in future be disqualified from the competition. We then followed up with the judging of this months ‘Open’ competition. Steve was the judge. He selected Chris’s portrait image of  Rachel as the winner in the Advanced section and Joni’s photo of  flowers as the winner in the intermediate section.

Next months competition theme is Still Life and so the image must have been taken since the beginning of February.

We then went through the results of the competition with Alton Camera Club. The results caused much discussion and in general we weren’t happy with their comments or scores. Colin had altered some of the entries in light of their comments but we felt that their suggestions only worked in about 50% of cases. The images and comments can bee seen here

After the raffle we had an interesting talk from Ulrich about Still Life photography. He started this talk with some details of the history of the genre dating right back to the earliest times of oil painting rather than just the photography of more modern times. He then described how the majority of his Still Life images rely on careful positioning with natural light rather than the use of artificial lighting. WE then rounded the evening off with a couple of photographic slides hows before adjourning to the bar opposite.

The next tutorial evening on 17th March will be run by Karl as both Chris and Colin are away.

This month we started the evening with the new system for reviewing the club competition entries on the theme close-up / detail. Colin was the judge this month and went through each of the images with his thoughts and comments on each of them and he selected Ulrich’s Damsel Flies as the winner in the Advanced section and joint winners if the intermediate section of Judith with her black and white flower and Ingrid’s Moustache. This system seemed to work well and was certainly much quicker than either of our previous judging schemes.

The second half of the evening was then devoted to a talk by Peter Tomlin on composition. His talk, with some of the on screen examples that he used evoked some considerable discussion. Hopefully we will all put into practice some of the suggestions that came from this talk. We had a few minutes at the end and we had a slide show of some of the best images from 2010 taken from the internet.

Next months competition theme is "Open" any image taken any time any place any where on any subject.

Since the meeting the new committee have met and sorted out the syllabus for the rest of the year. It will be subject to change but the following are the highlights that are what we hope to achieve in 2011.

• Future "Open" competitions will be loosely themed this will commence in October 2011
• During April we will have a day out taking ‘Action’ shots probably at Terra Natura for the flying birds of prey display
• During May we will have another studio session
• June tutorial evening will be a practical evening on using your camera in other than ‘auto’
• July walkabout location to be confirmed but ideally at a fiesta somewhere
• July Worldwide Photo Walk hopefully at Fontilles
• During November an evening photo shoot taking ‘Night Shots’ probably in Javea Port.
• Competitions against Bangor and Alton Camera Clubs as previous years.
• We are going to try and gear the ‘Tutorial Evenings’ to be more in tune with that months theme and maybe include some practical photography sessions rather than just Photoshop.

The meeting started with the usual business, there wasn’t much this month as most would be covered in the AGM later in the evening. Everyone was reminded that subs are due and that they are currently 10€ per year with an additional joining fee of 10€ for new members, junior members are charged 5€. Ulrich took a video at our Christmas meal this is a link to it Christmas Dinner 2010

We then looked at everyone’s Open photos for this months themed competition.  There was a varied selection of subjects in the entries this month. The winner of the advanced section was Ulrich with his evening photo of the Alhambra Palace. The winner of the intermediate section was Nichole with her portrait of the model in black. Well done to the winners. The scores were:

The theme for the February competition is Close-up / Detail.

We then followed this with the judging of the photographs of the year. The winner was Felicity with her ‘Light and Shade’ photograph  from November and the runner up was Mark with his ‘Legs’ photo from the December Askew competition. Well done to the 2010 winners.

After a short break we started the AGM. We agreed to reduce the number of ‘Open’ themed competitions from 5 to 3 a year. The main portion of the discussions was around the scoring system and it was agreed that the new scoring system didn’t work too well and also there was no desire to go back to the old system either. An ex-member, Roy Place FRPS, attended the meeting and gave us the benefit of his knowledge and experience of judging monthly competitions. Ideally we should use an external judge from another local club, unfortunately, this course of action is not available to us as there are no suitable local clubs. We therefore agreed to use one club member to be the judge and to comment on each of the photos in future. We will have a panel of about 3 club members to use for this judging taking it in turns to do the judging and where possible to use external judges as well like Roy or Gerry Coe when he is visiting. The first competition to be judged in this way will be the February competition.

We then adjourned to the bar opposite and it was nice with no smoke for a change.

We started the meeting with the usual business. Steve has offered to run a studio session with a professional model on Sunday 12th December at 11am in Javea. This event will be for a maximum of 5 photographers and will cost 10€ per photographer to pay the model for her time. Anyone wishing to take part please let Colin know ASAP as Steve is in the UK at the moment. Steve has also proposed running a workshop on ‘photographing birds in flight’ and this will be followed by a practical session at Terra Natura to photograph the Birds of Prey flying. The theme for that months competition will be Action to encompass the photographs taken as part of the workshop. The date is yet to be decided but it will be early in 2011.

Next months theme for the competition is OPEN. So it can be any photograph that you have taken of anything at any time.

We seem to be getting a bit quicker at judging the photos for the monthly competition. This month the theme was ‘Askew’ and there were some interesting interpretations on the them. Chis has already sent the results out but the winner in the Advanced section was Ulrich with 46.2 points and the winner of the Intermediate section was Mark. Well done to both winners. The results sheet is below for those that may not have seen it.

We then reviewed the photographs and the marking from the judge of our photos in the competition against Bangor and North Down Camera Club. We certainly did not agree with the judge’s scores and I have since heard from Bangor and they didn’t either. The judge did seem to like the number 14. It must be remembered that those were his opinions of the photos that were entered.

After we reviewed the competition results we had a little play with Puppet Warp in CS5 which was interesting.

Alton Camera Club have asked us to submit our photos for the competition against them over Christmas so that they can judge them at their meeting on the 4th January. As a result please let Colin have up to 5 photos of your choice by the 12th December at the latest as we have to select the 30 for the competition and get the CD in the post ASAP. To ensure that we do a better job scoring and commenting on their photos we will devote the whole of the tutorial meeting on the 27th January to this task instead of trying to fit it in on a normal club night. So all please make an effort to attend on the 27th.

Don’t forget our Christmas meal instead of the Tutorial Evening on the 16th. If you haven’t paid Joni yet please bring the correct money to the evening in an envelope for her.