Tuesday 10 September 2019

September Meeting


Our first session of the Fall season was very well attended and featured the works of 38 of our participating members. For this meeting, people were asked to bring along their cameras for a fall cleaning, as we had our semi-annual sensor cleaning clinic in high gear – thanks to the presence of our resident expert – Douglas Banks. We took advantage of his presence by having him talk to us about how we should care for our precious image recording devices. Douglas did a great job and even displayed actual sensors taken out of various types of cameras - from full frame, all the way down to a cell phone- interesting to be sure!



Our first slideshow of the night featured the works of 12 of our members who made the trek up to O’Hara Mill Homestead & Conservation Area this past month. It’s a wonderful pioneer village setting with many vintage buildings, implements, mill, covered bridge and attendants dressed in period costumes. Coupled with great light, the images were impressive.



Joseph Leduc was our next presenter, with a talk on various ways to creatively use Neutral Density Filters. Silky water, streaked clouds, making people magically disappear, panning, fireworks, and many other uses for neutral density filters were discussed and demonstrated with Joe’s impressive imagery.





The second half kicked off with a bang – well multiple bangs actually, from a Fireworks slideshow that featured 12 of our members. Coupled with Handel’s Music for the Royal Fireworks, it was a bang-up show, so-to-speak!


With a Texture theme challenge on the table, Margaret & I thought it appropriate to present our thoughts on Photographing Texture. I did the “how-to” stuff, while Margaret demonstrated the artistic side, stressing compositional considerations while showing numerous examples of great texture shots from past member submissions.



The evening ended with our theme challenge slideshow entitled The Power of One! The theme was intended to have our photographers simplify their imagery and concentrate on one core subject per image. 32 members answered the challenge with really creative imagery. These images, along with the Fireworks and O’Hara shots have been posted to our public Facebook page for all to see.



The theme challenge for September’s is Texture, while our October theme is entitled The Splendour of Fall. Both the Neutral Density and Photographing Texture presentations will be posted to our Youtube channel very shortly.