March Meeting Round-Up

Our March 2nd meeting was once again well attended. in spite of the formidable Oscar competition on the airwaves. In total, 24 members showed up, including two new attendees. As well, member participation in our sponsored events and theme challenges continues to rise. Twelve individuals contributed to our “County's Icy Shoreline” slideshow, while 23 members submitted pictures to the month's “Faces” theme challenge. Both of these sets of slides are available for viewing on our Facebook page at facebook.com/countyfotoclub.

Anna Lam entertained us with a slideshow entitled “Black and White and Red” which ably displayed her unique talent to make something extraordinary out of the ordinary things we pass by each day. Anna loves to desaturate colour in order to enhance the form, shadows and textures of her subject matter.

Alan Jenner put on an entertaining and informative photoshop workshop, focusing on four key graphic editing elements:

   - Making a Watermark and Saving it as a Brush Preset

   - Sharpening Tools in Photoshop

   - Layers and their Primary Uses

   - Using Layer Masks

Alan is in the process of finalizing videos for each of these four topics and they will be posted soon to our Youtube account.

Bert Jenkins and Margaret Liddon put on a presentation regarding this year's Clic Photo Show competition. They emphasized important changes made from prior year's shows and displayed a number of the winning and contending entries from previous years. The deadline for your entries is May 31st and more information can be had from the Clic website located at clicphotoshow.ca.

The March monthly theme challenge was handed down - “Still Life”. As usual, members are asked to send in images that have been taken during or near to the assignment period (March 2014). We request you send in preferably five images (with a maximum of 8 images) that have been watermarked with jpg's sized to approx. 1280 x 960 px. Try to keep the individual file size around 500kb each (cut back the jpg quality setting to about 90% or so) so that we can get the optimum benefit of good quality viewing and manageable file sizing. Ideally the files should be named as follows “YourName_Still Life1_DSC_0123.jpg” etc.

We are hoping to have an outing this month entitled Maple in the County and are just trying to confirm the availability of Honey Wagon Farms for Sunday March 16^th at 1:30pm. More on this later once it has been firmed up.

We plan to play a little guessing game at next month's meeting – trying to match our member photographers with images that they have shot. For this, we are asking that our contributing members send in one image (unwatermarked, taken at any time) that is typical of the style of photograph that they currently shoot/recently shown at the club. Only I and that photographer will know the true identity and we will see just how well our members are getting to know each other's photographic quirks and quarks! Please do not send in shots that purposely mislead, as this will defeat the purpose of the exercise. It should be a fun way of getting to know each other a little better.