The Arctic vortex subsided and the forecasted ice rain never materialized, allowing us to achieve a fine turn-out at our February 3^rd meeting – much better and more exciting entertainment that the dud bowl being broadcast to many TV sets that evening! We had 39 members submit images for the meeting – just about the same number as our night’s turn-out – thank you all.

I kicked the meeting off by showing three different methods that we could use to achieve images for our February Mono Plus One theme – requiring a monochrome image with just one additional colour remaining. Go over to our Youtube channel where this presentation will be available for review.

Our first slideshow of the evening was from our Frink Conservation Centre outing held earlier in January on a crisp, cold winter’s day. Twenty members contributed images from that day’s event, depicting lots of ice, but little snow. It always amazes how different and creative images taken at essentially the same place and time can be!

The featured speaker for the evening was Dave Tugwood, who discussed Depth-of-Field and other techniques that could be employed to produce artistic images that separated the subject from its surroundings. Dave’s fine selection of images demonstrated his techniques in all sorts of photography - from wedding shots to Landscapes, macros to telephotos. He ended with images incorporating the Bokeh concept for silky smooth backgrounds. Dave’s material will also be available on our Youtube channel. His presentation material essentially sets up our March theme challenge discussed below.

Don Tayler started off the second half with a colourful slideshow of the people and their environs in the small but unique country of Nepal. It depicted a friendly but impoverished populace with the heavy influence of Buddhism throughout their culture. Thanks Don for a great slideshow of a far-away location.

Our theme challenge for the month was entitled Winter Fantasy. With over 200 images submitted, we split the showing into two separate portions. Some members took the “Fantasy” theme in unexpected directions and locales. The images were tremendous and several members comic creativity made the shows really entertaining! These images along with our Frink Outing ones have already been posted to our public Facebook page for anyone to view.

We did manage to spend a while on our Critiquing the Masters process, whereby the audience was asked to participate in discussing the merits and effectiveness of a number of great photographs by Master Photographers.

Our theme challenges for the next two months are Mono plus One (colour) for February and Soft & Shallow for March.