February Newsletter
Feb 19th, 2008 by Keith Chaloner
February 2008
Editor’s Notes
I have made a new year’s resolution and have decided that I must take tripods more seriously. I find I can do the buying bit quite easily (I own several), it is the using bit that I am not very good at. Occasionally I can even manage the carrying bit but I all too often find at the end of the day, that it is still in its bag. Coupled with this is a determination to use filters more effectively, especially the slot-in sort that allow the use of neutral grads that facilitate ‘pre-capture manipulation’, which is so much quicker – and, indeed, more acceptable for some - than the post-capture variety. Even here, I have already made a start and bought the kit - - -.
Talking of tripods, a friend recently made the point that one should be able to sit on a decent tripod and if one couldn’t, it wasn’t sturdy enough. A handy tip for anyone tempted to try – first be quite sure that you have spread your legs adequately or it could be a painful experience! Even then, only the foolhardy would proceed with anything less than extreme caution.
With the February Points Cup competitions already behind us, the end of the season and the significant events that that brings is looming. All of our Annual Exhibition entries have to be in by Tuesday 11th March – barely three weeks away. The AGM is on Tuesday 1st April; not that for most of us this requires any special preparation as all we have to do is to keep our diaries free and be there! In addition, there are still a few Dorset Post Offices that remain to be recorded by our members. If you are unsure about which are needed play safe and, if you pass one, photograph it.
Malcolm Bowditch
RECENT EVENTS
Images of New Zealand
Our first meeting after the Christmas break was held on Tuesday 8th January when the club was entertained by Di and John Tilsley with ‘Images of New Zealand’. Di and John have made two long visits to New Zealand in recent years and have accumulated a remarkable range of slides of the highest technical and aesthetic quality. The presentation was broken down into sections with a brief introduction to each by one or other of the authors. Each section was therefore uninterrupted by commentary but was accompanied instead by carefully selected speech or music soundtracks. The Maori is impenetrable to most and so John felt it wise to point out that it frequently has associated with it, sounds that could be mistaken, in English, for a major four letter swear word. One could speculate that there may well have been just as many, or more, genuine swear words but, for most, these would have passed unnoticed.
Superb pictures of spectacular scenery and rare and fascinating wildlife made the evening very special. The locations and other names are unspecified because, for me, the language is not only unpronounceable but also unspellable.
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Points Cup No. 4
Our fourth Points Cup competitions of the year were held on Tuesday 15th January when our judge was David Warhurst from Poole. Unfortunately he was delayed in traffic (cars and trains – no boats or planes) and was therefore rather late appearing. Fred Denham, President but also a practised judge of course, stood in and judged the slides. Of the twenty entries, Graham Poynter was awarded ten for a rather beautiful landscape and three others - Jean Bartlett, Julian Forder and Malcolm Saunders - all received well-deserved nines.
It was during Fred’s critique of the slides that our expected judge for the evening appeared and he took over to deal with the sixty-three prints that confronted him. During the course of his judgement, coloured images submitted by Jean Bartlett, Norman Carey and David Cornes were all given maximum points. Peter Gafney, Jacky Poynter and Ken Stevens were all awarded 9½, also for colour entries. Monochrome workers fared rather less well but Peter Gafney received 9½ for a beautifully lit, toned picture of a flight of steps.
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An evening with Brian Winkle
On Tuesday 22nd January, members and guests enjoyed their regular, annual entertainment provided by Brian Winkle. Brian’s success depends as much on his sense of humour as it does on his photographic capabilities. His practical competence as both photographer and judge is well known but his interest in, and knowledge of, the work of photographers from both the past and the present is less well known than it deserves to be.
Having set the scene for the evening with some less well known definitions of common photographic terms, e.g. Autofocus (automatic version of a well known car) - though the Fiasco is even better known by some, including the Ed., Polygonal lasso (useful tool for recovery of lost parrot) he went on to provide illustrated talks on the work of Robert Doisneau and Helmut Newton. This was followed by a presentation on Marilyn Monroe as a model rather than as a film star.
The evening finished after a short film featuring Buster Keaton, thus ensuring, as Brian intended, that all left with a smile on their faces.
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Walking in the Tatra Mountains
Richard Collier from Wool was our guest speaker on Tuesday 29th January when he entertained the club with slides of great photographic quality accompanied by a superb commentary on some pretty serious walking in the Tatra Mountains of Poland and Slovakia. As a one-time guide, his familiarity with the mountains was impressive. His talk commenced with slides of Krakớw, the Royal City, and the starting point for his guided walks in the Polish Tatra. He remarked on the quality of the food (largely based on cabbage) and beer (cheap) before showing breathtaking pictures of the mountains and of walkers making their way along razor-edged ridges and along cliff-edge paths sometimes several inches wide.
Starting from the beautiful city of Prague, the Slovakian Tatra were then featured in the second part of his fascinating presentation, illustrated again with the mountainous scenery but also with pictures of the native flora and fauna. In this way, the evening was enjoyed by all, save some minor reservations on the part of those (including the writer) affected by vertigo.
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Points Cup No. 5
Ann Mahany of Fordingbridge was welcomed as the judge for our fifth Points Cup competitions on Tuesday 5th February when she judged a total of eighty-three images. She judged with care and consideration and, starting with the eighteen slides, awarded a ten to Jan Carey for a thoughtfully composed picture of Venice. Pam Woodhouse also received maximum points for a shop interior in the small print section. The colour print workers were rewarded with two tens, with pictures by Diàne Horsfall (Barn Owl) and Bryan Harris (Berries) being successful. Diàne Horsfall was again successful in the monochrome section (scoring ten with a picture of a dead daffodil) and Malcolm Bowditch (with a photograph featuring a sad figure on a bench) also received the maximum mark. Both images looked rather better than their brief descriptions suggest.
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SAPA competion with Parkstone Camera Club
Last Tuesday (12th February) evening saw club members assemble in pleasing numbers together with representatives of Parkstone Camera Club when we met for our second SAPA league battle. Our judge for the evening was Robin Dumbreck whose smooth, relaxed and perceptive commentary on each and every one of the forty-eight images presented was a very important component of the evening’s entertainment. However, apart from providing an opportunity to see new work and to hear an educated commentary on it, these events are also competitions in which a club’s collective fate hinges on the views of a single individual. In the event, Robin spread his marks from 6½ to 10. Against this background, we were pleased to find that we had beaten Parkstone in both the print and the slide sections, thus ensuring that we shall appear in the prints section of the SAPA League Final later in the season. Diàne Horsfall and John Burton are to be congratulated for being the only two to receive the maximum points for their images, both of which were prints.
DORSET POST OFFICES
Images of Dorset Post Offices are starting to come in on disc as requested which is very good. There are still a number yet to be photographed so please keep going. Some may have ‘got’ the occasional PO when out trying to capture the winning image in the Dorset Church’ competition, who knows? There is still another fortnight to receive files but this is just a matter of convenience because, as we all know, the actual presentation that we are to make to ourselves at the club is not scheduled to happen until 22nd April. So there is still time.
Edited by Malcolm Bowditch
