March Meeting - Behind Bars!

We had a stellar turn-out at last night’s meeting, attesting to the power of the creative still image – even during Hollywood’s special Oscar global gala. The meeting represented the fifth anniversary of our commencement as a photography club. We’ve come a long way in that time, as evidenced by the quality of the images and presentation material. But most importantly, our member participation continues to grow with a full 40 members contributing towards last night’s proceedings.

We started with a reminder of “A Moment in Time” photo show by ten of our members that is currently on display at the John M Parrott Art Gallery in Belleville and continues until March 21^st. 

Our first presenter of the night was Bert Jenkins who explained the impact of a camera’s sensor size on hyperfocal distance (HFD). Notwithstanding mathematical formulae and tables galore, the key take-away was that smaller sensor cameras such as micro four-thirds are excellent alternatives for landscape type photography where you want everything from close-up to far away in sharp focus. Larger full-frame cameras have shallower depth-of-field (all things being equal) and are a favoured choice by portrait and wedding photographers where HFD is not the key criterion.

The first slideshow of the night was from the nineteen members who attended our Belleville Moira River Walk on a snowy grey winter’s day last month. Following our trek into downtown Belleville, we ended up gorging ourselves at Bourbon Street Pizza.

Our feature presenter of the evening was one of our new recruits - Joseph Leduc who has been in the photography business for many decades. He teaches and puts on workshops at a number of other photography clubs. Earlier this year, Joe offered to put on a workshop for some of our members. Our Executive Committee members leapt at the opportunity and were tutored by Joe in early January. After escaping from Joe’s in-house jail cell, the group was put through their paces on some really neat macro workstations. At last night’s meeting, Joe re-capped his Fire & Water workshop and his simple, yet creative approach to photographic magic! He treated us all to a humorous and informative account of macro photography the “Leduc” way.

We started the second half with a short slideshow of the Exec Committee’s macro photo images from Joe’s aforementioned workshop – even the pyrotechnics!

Next up, I put on a short discussion on How to Make an Effective Slideshow. We discussed various pre-planning, image selection/ordering, audio prep and video encoding ideas, including a number of excellent (and free!) software programs to get the job done right.

Our final slideshow of the night was our theme challenge entitled – Line, Shape, Texture & Rhythm. Thirty-five members contributed images to this challenge, so we broke it into two separate parts. The images, along with those from the Belleville outing and the Macro Workshop, have now been uploaded to our public Facebook page – do go over and have a look as there is some really superb imagery there.

The theme challenges for the next two months have been handed down – Fifty Shades of Grey for March and Everyday Items with a Twist! for April.

Thanks to all those who came out to the meeting and we look forward to another great month of photography ahead of us all!