Competing with the Elements as well as the Super Bowl

Over thirty of our members braved the snowy conditions and forsook the stiff Super Bowl competition on Sunday to see and hear the creative works of many of our group. The evening showcased Alan Jenner’s recent experimentations with Smoke Photography. Not only did Alan show and tell us about this craft, but he also demo’ed the procedure and got some pretty impressive results to boot! Alan’s presentation materials are in the process of being prepared for upload to our Youtube channel for your viewing pleasure.

The evening started with a quick topic item on Tone Mapping where I explained one of the tools in your digital editing arsenal for handling the dynamic range issue and getting the most out of your camera’s raw file. That presentation will also be up on our Youtube channel in the next day or so.

Slideshows dominated the night’s agenda starting with our club outing to the Dunes in Winter (Sandbanks). Well it turned out to be a beautiful sunny day with no snow to be seen! Twelve of us put our cameras to work and the results have been posted to our public Facebook page – so go over and take a peak. Lewis Parker treated us to a topside view of the Grand Canyon that he took on a trip there last year. It truly is one of the natural wonders of the world. Our final slideshow of the evening had to be split in two as we had such great member participation in our Winter Ways ... theme challenge. Thirty-one members contributed well over 200 images in total to that theme. Both Part 1 and Part 2 slides have been uploaded to our public Facebook page.

We had one other significant agenda item – namely our What, Why, How segment where four of our own got up to talk to one of their images and how they crafted the fully processed version. Thanks to Mike Montgomery, Gail Hamilton, Doug Smith and Chris Ward for participating in this recurring feature.

As usual, the theme challenges for the next 60 days were handed down – Our World – First in Colour, Next in B&W/Poly for February and Shadows & Silhouettes for March. To clarify the February theme, we are asking for 4 pairs of images, the first in full colour and then the same image in B&W (or polychrome).