July Meeting on Horizon!

Our next meeting is on Sunday July 6th at 7pm in the Wellington Public Library and it will feature a member's print exhibition. Please bring along two printed images 8”x10” or larger and mounted (preferrably) on bristol board with a 2” or so surround (no watermarking or other identification to be on the prints).  Also, please bring along a pen and some sort of clipboard or other hard surface that you can write on.  As usual, there will be lots of photo related topics and slideshows on the agenda for all to enjoy.

Also, we hope to see many of you out to the Lavender Festival on Saturday July 5th.  It is located at 732 Closson Rd in Hillier.  We plan to meet there at 10:30 Saturday morning. The festival runs both Saturday & Sunday from 10am til 5pm.  It costs $5 per person and there is entertainment and lots of colourful photo ops.

June Meeting - a Review

We had a good turnout at our June Club meeting which included a number of visitors from St. Philip's Anglican Church of Milford, there to see our Black River Canoe event coverage. The meeting featured lots of slideshows, including our two club outings - the PEPtBO Birding Festival and the Black River Canoe Excursion.

  

 

Daphne put on a wonderful display of images taken on her many photographic walks “Around the Horn” of the County. Janice came back with a wonderful take on the people of Guatemala – at work and at play. Our educational session for the night was hosted by Bert who demonstarted how he takes a “raw” image and turns out his finished jpg picture. In the process, he had to overcome a few technical issues between Windows 8 and our projection system. The meeting ended with a great display of member images interpreting the month's “Dominant Colour” theme challenge. Please check our facebook page to see images from our member outings and theme challenge slideshows (www.facebook.com/countyfotoclub).

Our Theme challenge for June is “The 3 B's – Bugs, Bees and Butterflies”. So please get out your close-up or macro equipment and let's see these critters in their full glory.

We are having a club outing, next Sunday June 8^th at 2pm at the Beaver Meadow Conservation Area. Please wear long pants and bring along appropriate bug and/or tick sprays as mosquitoes, etc. could be hungry. The conservation area is located about 1 km from the County Rd 11 turnoff from County Rd 10 (Lake Street) on the way to Sandbanks from Picton. Drive well into the conservation area to park.

For next month's meeting on July 6^th, we are asking each of you to bring along 2 printed images that are not watermarked, sized at least 8” x 10”, and mounted on bristol board with a 2-3” border. In addition, the images should have been taken within the past 12 months. We plan to spend a considerable portion of the meeting examining these exhibited prints. I would strongly recommend that you do not leave printing these to the last minute as from my own experience, it can involve difficult choices. You can print them yourself with your inkjet printers or utilize one of the kiosks that can print the 8x10 inch size.

Now, stop reading this, pick up your cameras and go interpret the wonderful world we all live in.

May Meeting In Review

Our May meeting featured the arrival of Spring with our Spring Fling theme. As well a workshop on How to Improve Our Flower Photography brought many colourful images and ideas for the group to consider as we move into the warmer months ahead. We had a “May the Forth ...” start to our Aviation Museum outing slideshow and that “olde man river” ran and sang through our Falls Tour outing slideshow – all in good fun. Images from these three slideshows have been uploaded to our facebook site for your viewing pleasure  (www.facebook.com/countyfotoclub). 

Caspar and Inge treated us to an upbeat and colourful journey through the beautiful and historic city of Lisbon. As well, we had some useful camera techniques for both beginners (using the exposure compensation +/- button) and advanced users (back button auto focusing). For those that want to see that back button Youtube video again – the url link is as follows:

http://nikonrumors.com/2014/01/25/how-to-use-nikons-af-on-and-back-button-autofocus.aspx/ 

Canon users who want to try back button focusing may want to see the following link to help navigate through Canon's menu structure:

http://www.digitalcameraworld.com/2012/08/14/back-button-focus-made-easy/2/

We issued the May theme challenge which is “Dominant Colour”. We look forward to your creative and artistic interpretations of this theme.

There will be two outings in May with slideshows resulting therefrom. The first one is the Birding Festival which is on from May 10^th to May19^th. The actual outing will be a guided walk at 10:00am on Sunday May 11^th meeting at the PEPtBO Bird Observatory.  For those of you who cannot make that time, please go at another date and send in your images for the slideshow. One caution that I do have is that the ticks are very bad this year, especially at the birding site so I recommend that you wear long clothing – maybe even tucked into your socks. I was down there yesterday and I woke up to find a tick had engorged himself into my leg.

The second outing will be the Canoe/Kayak run of the Black River on Monday May 19^th starting near Milford and ending up just passed the Cheese Factory at Black River. This event starts at 10:30 am and takes about 1 hour to reach the destination. You are welcome to bring your canoes or take pictures from the shore/bridge of the participants and other activities of that day. A map is also attached of the route with start and end points. Shuttle transport is available to get back to your vehicles should you decide to participate.

As usual, we expect all those who participate in the outings to send along their best shots of the events for the member slideshows. 

April Meeting Review

We had one of our largest gatherings yet at the April meeting with members anxious to see anything resembling Spring and its welcome floral displays. Luckily, our guest speaker for the evening – Court Noxon – put on a vivid display of County wildflowers and other living things that we all hope will soon be the subject matter for many of our photographic exploits in the coming months. Court is the author of “Field, Forrest, Hedgerow – A hiker's wildflower guide for Prince Edward County”. Besides being a naturalist, Court is also an avid photographer and put on an artistic view of flora and fauna in this region. Court also has a very helpful website (www.wildflowers-pec.on.ca) that is geared to assist in the identification and understanding of wildflowers that inhabit the County.

We also saw a splendid display of the landscape and unique wildlife of the Galapagos Islands by Bert Jenkins, from a trip he made to the area in 2009. Member slideshows from our recent trip to Honey Wagon Farms and our March theme challenge - Still Life – were also well received – these two shows have now been uploaded to our facebook site (www.facebook.com/countyfotoclub) for your viewing pleasure. The club would like to extend a very warm thank you to Sandi and Ed Taylor who graciously allowed us to tour and photograph their wonderful property – Honey Wagon Farms.

In a continuing attempt to get to know each other better, we played a little game with the goal of matching up the (member) photographer with his/her image – in a test of photographic styles. The co-winners of this contest were Ramesh Pooran and Margaret Liddon with identical scores of 13 out of 18. The average score was more in the 50% range implying we probably have more work in front of us on this "get-to-know-each-other" bent! Ramesh received a gift - “Exploring Photography” - a historic BBC look at artistic photographers and their photographic styles. It is expected that this book will be passed around and shared with other members in the group over time.

In regards to our Still Life challenge, only 17 members participated this time around, down somewhat from recent club challenges. I'm guessing that the reasons were two fold. First, the subject matter may not immediately appeal to many of us who would prefer more active/expansive subjects – animals, people, landscapes, birds, … Second, to do this well, it took work! It wasn't just walking around with the camera and clicking the shutter. In most cases, you had to set up the display, move it (or arrange lighting) to where the subject could best be transposed onto film and finally, compose the image in the viewfinder often with camera on a tripod while taking the image. For some of us, it also required considerable post image processing to get rid of marks on glasses and annoying/unwanted reflections etc. However, I'd suggest that those who did not take part, really missed out on a learning and “pushing the comfort zone” exercise. Many of the submitted images where truly spectacular – especially from a lighting, physical composition and viewfinder composition standpoint. Please take a careful look at the facebook images as to how various photographers have used lighting for dramatic effect.

March - Maple in the County Outing

Our planned outing to Honey Wagon Farms (265 Sandy Hook Rd) is now confirmed for Sunday March 16^th at 1:30pm. We have the gracious approval of the owners to come on their property to take pictures. Looking at the weather forecast, it is projected to be sunny, but cold on Sunday – so the sap may not be running very much. Nevertheless, this property has some wonderful trails through the maple bush with lots of antiques and old farm implements along the way. They also use the conventional bucket method of sap collection, so there will be no ugly blue collection lines disrupting our photographs. Given the snow conditions, it would be wise to wear high winter boots and have your snow shoes in the car just in case you need them. Dress warmly – preferably in layers.

Below is a map of the location of Honey Wagon Farms - not far from the Waring House. Hope to see many of you there on Sunday and please take lots of pictures so that we can use them for a slideshow at our next meeting.

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.

February Club Meeting - Recap

Our February 2^nd meeting concentrated on winter photography – both the hazards and the splendours of this magical yet precarious time of the year. Just as well, as earlier that morning, Wiarton Willy saw his shadow indicating another 6 weeks of white photogenic backgrounds and chilly fingers for all of us here in Southern Ontario. Even with the competing football game, we had very good attendance and submissions of over 20 members to the Club Challenge. We got to wear our new “selfie” name badges for the first time and some people got quite creative. The meeting's agenda featured several short member slideshows including one by Tina Konecny on her recent Jack Frost visitation and one by Carol Quinn entitled “All Aboard” depicting a friend's elaborate model train set-up. On the education front, in addition to a Winter Photography workshop, we delved into the options and use of social media sites on the web for displaying, sharing and promoting our images for others to see. Eric Pierce put on an on-line/live demo focusing on Facebook as one of the primary sites for these activities. Two longer slideshows depicting our recent club outing at Macaulay Mountain Conservation Area and our January monthly theme challenge of “Ice & Snow” were shown. These have now been uploaded to the Club's facebook account located at facebook.com/countyfotoclub. Please go to the site and view these lovely images and you are welcome to share them with your family and friends for their viewing pleasure as well.  Here is a sampling:

Our next meeting will be March 2^nd at which time we will see the results of our new monthly challenge entitled “Faces”. We encourage you to be as creative as you wish in your submissions and interpretations to this theme. As usual, we ask for 5 to 8 images to be submitted by Feb 24^th, which we will assemble into a slideshow for all to see.