March Meeting - an Overview

We've now entered our fifth year of operation and our meetings keep getting bigger and better – although this one also ran a little longer than we had expected. The meeting covered a lot of topics starting with a discussion by Mike Montgomery of the inevitability of precious data/image loss and how to provide Backup protection. This is an important subject that we will address in more detail at a future meeting.

The evening really started to get interesting with a session entitled – Processing By Others. Following a short introduction from Ansel Adams, five of our advanced photographers (Doug Smith, Mike Montgomery, Marilyn Sprissler, Dave Tugwood & Chris Ward) took up the challenge which involved submitting one raw file image and having it processed by all five of them. Even they were surprised (and somewhat amused) by the results. It really was facinating how different, yet effective, each of the images were processed. Ansel would have been proud of the resulting “performances” of the raw file “scores”.

As usual, slideshows dominated the night’s agenda starting with our club outing to the Ranney Gorge area near Campbellford. Freshly fallen snow covered an icy trail with many a spill along the way – but that didn’t get in the way of some excellent image taking. Daphne Creasy and Janice Ruggles-Bolton treated us to a very different landscape with their Canyons & Beyond show featuring exotic scenery of Utah, Arizona and Nevada from their trip last fall to the area. Our theme challenge slideshow of the evening once again was so well subscribed that it had to be split into two sections. Thirty-three members contributed over 250 images in total to the Our World – First in Colour, Then in Black & White/Polychrome theme. The club outing slides, along with Part 1 and Part 2 theme slides have been uploaded to our public Facebook page.

The main presenter of the night was Chris Ward who took us through his Panorama techniques and processing wizardry to arrive at those large high definition images that he is becoming very well known for. We learned everything from how to avoid parallax to an extensive discussion of the use of layers and useful plugins for Adobe Photoshop. Chris talked to numerous examples of his work including one that took well over 100 individual images for the impressive pano. Chris produces beautiful works of art that take a lot of planning, execution and processing prowess.

The meeting concluded with providing the theme challenges for the next 60 days- Shadows & Silhouettes for March and Water on the Move ... for April. 

Thanks to all those who came out and especially to those who participated during the past month.