Blandford Forum Camera Club

On Tuesday 29th June, twenty-four club members assembled - with the permission of the owner - at Manor Farm, Tarrant Monkton, where they were met by Steve and Dawn who were to be our hosts for our guided tour of this impressive Dorset farm on a wonderful summer evening. After an introduction to the farm and a brief walk around the farm buildings we climbed aboard a trailer equipped with straw-bale seating facilities and towed by a tractor. From this elevated position, we were able to appreciate the countryside at its best, featuring wildlife including rabbits, pheasants and deer all of which were shot (in the photographic sense) by a broadside of cameras. We were also able to view acres of ripening barley – and very possibly wheat – lit by evening sun and rippled by the breeze.

After a visit to a modern milking parlour where the problems of bovine tuberculosis were earnestly discussed by several of us with much interest and enthusiasm but precious little knowledge, we returned to the farm where we had the obligatory ‘team photo’ before enjoying excellent refreshments prepared by Dawn.

All in all a really enjoyable evening that offered social intercourse and photo opportunities galore.

Malcolm Bowditch

I had the following comment by email

‘I bought ‘The Photographer’s Eye’ by Michael Freeman from Amazon sometime ago, but hadn’t looked at it very much. I have to admit that, if I had seen it in a shop I probably wouldn’t have bought it. When it arrived my initial impression was that it was quite technical and too advanced for a beginner. Having read your post on the website, I have been taking another look at it, and have found it to be more interesting than I’d first thought. I’m sure that in the future I will be referring to it more often.

As someone new to photography, the book I have found to be very helpful is, ‘Understanding Exposure’ By Bryan Peterson. I have other books by the same author including, ‘Learning To See Creatively’ and find him easy to understand.’

My reply:
The writer was dead right, it is not really a book for beginners and I should also have made it clear that it is not an easy read. I really shouldn’t have let my enthusiasm run away with me and have the temerity to tell anyone what to buy or read!

For the moment I am having trouble with the comment facility on the site and until it is sorted, if anyone wants to add something to this topic, please email me

Keith

Guy Edwardes – celebrated for his nature and landscape photography – is to give us a presentation at 7.30 pm on Tuesday 16^th November 2010 at The Parish Centre, Blandford.  I am now offering tickets to club members at the discounted price of £3 but, because we cannot fill the hall from our membership, I shall be offering tickets for the full price of £5 to the wider camera club community towards the end of the summer in order to ensure a full house. So contact me now in order to be sure that you get tickets for what is certain to be a great evening.  When they are gone, they are gone!  

Eric Langley

For those of you sharing my diminished ability to retain information, particularly of the spoken word, and have already forgotten most of the content of Norman’s discourse, pay attention!
Michael Freeman’s excellent book ‘The Photographer’s Eye’ provides an exhaustive treatment of the subject and, because the written word has retentive properties that my poor brain doesn’t any more, it can be read and referred to time and time again. This book, delivering Michael Freeman’s seemingly limitless grasp of his subject, is a must have for anyone serious about improving their photography. I cannot recommend it too highly.
Checking this morning I see that this book is available from Amazon at £10.62; buy it.

I note that ‘The Professional Guide to Capturing Perfect Digital Photographs’ by the same author is also well reviewed and available at the same price and I have ordered this as well. I will report my opinion later, for what it’s worth.
How about some feedback? Have you read either book and do you agree with my opinion? Have you books that you would not be without?

How to send an opinion:
Send me an email and I will put it on the web site, or, if you have been registered as a subscriber you can comment via the web site direct although it won’t appear on the site until it has been moderated.
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Go to the home page and the Login for member’s panel on the right hand side and left click login.
Alternatively: Go to the home page, open the article you wish to comment on and, at the bottom of the article, where it says Leave a Reply, left click on the logged in link in the line of text (You must be logged in to post a comment.)
You then get the login panel where you enter your user name (exactly as it was given to you) and password, left click login. (If you click the remember me box you will not have to enter your password every time.
This returns you to the home page and the article you selected for comment. At the bottom of the article is a box for your comment. Type it in and left click submit comment. Job done! Before your comment is made live on the site it has to be initiated by the moderator (me)
If you intend commenting in the future, I suggest you copy the bit of text above and save it somewhere you can refer to when you forget. I am afraid that is as simple as I can make it.
Keith

‘Don’t be lazy, zoom with your feet’.  I’m sure we’ve all heard or read that a few times, certainly several times during the past season alone.  Not to be lazy is always good advice and the exhortation to ‘zoom with your feet’ would also be fair enough if the sole object of changing focal length is to adjust the size of an important object within the picture so as to sit well within the frame.  But there is more to it than that surely.  If one were photographing an essentially two dimensional subject it would be fine, but generally we – and especially landscape workers - are dealing with a subjects having great depth and are attempting to make them look that way on the flat, two-dimensional surface of a piece of paper or a screen.  We are also striving to interpret the subject in our own individual way.  This means that we have to resort to a range of tactics, not the least of which is to use perspective to our advantage.  Just changing the focal length of the lens alone will not do that and neither will the use of a single prime lens, however far we walk with it (see footnote).  Instead, we have to use our feet in addition to selecting a different focal length. 

By way of an example, suppose I were trying to photograph a country house, using the stone piers of the open gateway to frame the subject, and I wanted to employ the sinuous driveway as a lead line with the main subject (the house) on, say, the top right hand third.  Let us further suppose that with the gateway framing the subject, I find that the house seems too close to the gate and the drive appears to be foreshortened.  To change this and to convey the grand scale of the subject, I must use a shorter focal length – but then I find that the gateway is no longer at either edge of the frame but now appears some way in, i.e. I have included a wider field of view but the perspective remains unchanged.  To correct this I must then walk towards the subject in order to re-establish the framework of the stone piers in the preferred position and only then will I have achieved the composition I want with the altered perspective. 

A further, and very well-known, example illustrating the significance of appropriate perspective is that of the tourist supporting the leaning tower at Pisa.  Visitors will know that the ‘must take’ snap is that of one’s companion leaning and pushing with her/his hand to hold up the tower whilst looking towards the camera.  Most tourists intuitively make a sensible decision about choice of focal length and relative distances between camera/poser/tower so that the poser is supporting the tower by a huge effort at perhaps a third of the way up.  It would be less impressive if the poser’s apparent height were to be comparable with that of the tower when she/he could presumably support it with one finger.  The resulting picture would be equally unconvincing if she/he appeared to be very short since, however Herculean the effort, pushing against the buttresses or base of the tower would be quite obviously futile. 

In short - and although it is often helpful just to change the angle of view - to alter perspective, both focal length and viewing position must both be changed.  Perhaps we should encourage each other with ‘Don’t be lazy, zoom and use your feet’?                                                                                                                             

Footnote: Axel Brück,  Practical Composition in Photography, Focal Press Ltd., 1981 – and elsewhere. 

Malcolm Bowditch

The exhibition was open from 09.30h until 17.00h on 29-30^th May at the Corn Exchange, Blandford where approximately 430 photographic images entered by over eighty individual workers could be seen.  As usual, the exhibition showed photographs from members in the Club Section and work by photographers from the surrounding area in the Open Section.

Our judge this year was locally-based Colin Varndell, justly renowned for his splendid wild life photography, and it was a pleasure for us to have him to present the various cups and trophies and also to welcome his wife.  The Mayor of Blandford, Councillor Esme Butler, also graced the event with her presence when she gave a short address and made presentations to winners of the mobile phone photo competition which had ‘deposited rubbish within the town’ as its subject.  

About a half of the photographs on display (202) were from club members.  Twenty-seven members entered a total of 66 colour prints and Peter Gafney won this competition with Andy Fale and Jackie Poynter in second and third places respectively.  Jackie is now a SAPA judge of course and the fact that she needed to enter just the one print to achieve the second spot reflects well on her judgement!

The monochrome print competition, with twenty prints on display, was supported by ten club workers.  Peter Gafney did even better in this section coming first and second but with Dave Hurley just behind in third place.  The Founder’s Cup is awarded for the best set of three – generally related - monochrome prints and this year it was especially well supported with seven members entering.  This was in sharp contrast with last year when nobody entered!  The winner of this trophy was – wait for it - Peter Gafney, with Brian Winkle second and Mike Ballard third.   

Five members entered the club slide competition which was won by Bernard Smith with Graham Poynter second and Eric Langley third.  The digital projected image competition (we’re going to have to learn to call them DPI’s or similar at some stage) was popular with no fewer than nineteen members entering a total of fifty-six images between them.  Success here went exclusively to the women members with Heather Bowditch winning the trophy and Marilyn Peddle and Dionne Horsfall placed second and third.  In this competition, three images were commended and all of these too were awarded to women, including Heather Bowditch (again!), Pat Catley and Jackie Poynter.   For readers wondering what happened to Peter Gafney, I should explain that he didn’t enter either of the projected image competitions.

It is a feature of our annual exhibition to invite visitors to vote for their favourite print from among the club entries and on this occasion it was won by Ronnie Welstead with a picture of a cat – possibly her own - named ‘Truffle’.  A further regular feature of this annual event is the raffle, and on this occasion the star prize was a bottle of champagne.  Who won it, I hear you cry!  Well, if I say that Peter bought a ticket, need I say more – except that it is perhaps fortunate for some of the rest of us that he didn’t buy more! 

The results from the open section of the exhibition were as follows.  The Open Challenge Trophy for colour prints was won by Ron Holmes of Wimborne with Graham Hutton (Wimborne) second and Roger Holman (Wimborne) third.  The Open Challenge Shield for monochrome prints was won by Malcolm Bowditch (Broadstone) with Geoff Munsey (Fordingbridge) second and Keith Chaloner (WImborne) third.  The David Gent Memorial Trophy for transparencies was won by Raymond Baker (Sherborne).  Sheila Brown (Poole) was placed both second and third in this competition.  The DPI Cup for digital images was won by John Larry (Verwood) who also came third.  Norman Crabb (Yeovil) came second.

In reflecting on an exhibition of pictures of this kind a day or two after the event, it is interesting to find just which have stuck in the mind.  Of the hundreds of images viewed, which ones have imprinted themselves on the memory cells?  Five in my case and all showed originality and imagination but failed – no doubt for very good reasons - to make a significant impact on our judge.  It would be invidious to identify them but unfortunately they weren’t mine!

It has become a tradition to show photographs produced by the Blandford School Photoclub and this year we featured four top pictures with Evie Opalka (1^st), Charlotte Matthews (2^nd), Lindsay Acott (3^rd) and Adam Gonthier (Commended).

Overall, the exhibition was a great success and made the more pleasurable by the availability of fresh, home-made sandwiches, cakes and other delicacies provided by club members.  This was a little like the club DPI competition all over again with the women performing well and the men totally excluded!  It was also a pleasure to have our President, Fred Denham, present on both days.  We hope to see more of him next season.

Under Norman Carey’s stewardship, the annual exhibition has continued to develop and flourish as he and his team have shown themselves willing to embrace changes that help – often in small but important ways - to improve the standard of the event in terms of the manner in which it is mounted and the way in which it is organised.  Thank you folks!

Malcolm Bowditch