Blandford Forum Camera Club

Colin Gogerty was the judge for our third Points Cups Competitions on Tuesday 6^th December when he visited the club for the first time. It was truly a baptism of fire for him to be confronted with a massive entry of 101 images, all demanding his attention.  To his credit – and despite being a relative newcomer to the judging scene - Colin was unfazed at the prospect of judging at the rate of almost one a minute.  He started with the slides – just eight entries - and followed with the PDI’s and then, after the break, he dealt with the prints.

In a small slide entry, Julian Forder was the highest scorer with a 9½.  There were 53 PDI’s and five tens were awarded to Marilyn Peddle, Jacky Stevens, John Burt and Malcolm Bowditch (2).

After the break, 40 prints were judged and an astonishing nine top scores were given and gratefully received by Jean Bartlett, Keith Chaloner and Peter Gafney for monochrome pictures and to Marilyn Peddle, Ronnie Wellstead, Ian Ferris, Peter Gafney, Graham Hutton and Alf Tompkins for colour prints.

Colin had something useful and constructive to say about many of the photographs though some other judges might be less inclined to second guess photographers’ intentions as to what they intended to portray.  But he was under very severe time pressures and everyone I spoke to thought he had done a good job.  Although it is very pleasing to have an enthusiastic response to a competition, we maybe had rather more pictures than we could properly appreciate on this hectic but still enjoyable occasion.

Malcolm Bowditch

Those of you who mount prints will know how frustrating it can be if the ‘window’ is not cut our cleanly. I recently had such a problem where the cutter blade did not always cleanly cut through the surface of the mount card. I tried adjusting the depth the blade protruded from the cutter block but still suffered from the same problem. I eventually found it to be caused by blades that were not sharp (even though new). After a quick ’strop’ against the surface of the hard rubber surface of my cutting mat, the ‘problem’ disappeared and the windows cleanly cut again. Mine may have been an isolated occurrence but if you have similar difficulties my ‘fix’ may help.

Keith

On Tuesday 29^th November we had the pleasure of the company of John and Di Tilsley who gave a two-part presentation entitled ‘Life after slides’.  The first half was devoted to a talk from John in which he described his approach to the creation of his beautiful darkroom-produced, monochrome prints, a number of which he showed by way of illustration and which featured mainly landscapes and cityscapes.   If you have ever wondered just how good a monochrome landscape can be, then a brief viewing of John’s work will help you come to a rapid and very favourable conclusion.

John has not only a good eye for a fine composition and the ability to translate his vision into a superb photographic print but he also has that rare and most enviable ability to articulate clearly the thinking that underlies the whole process.  In a nutshell, he not only walks the walk; he also talks the talk!  These are the skills for which he is best known to us and from which we all benefit when he makes his all-too-rare visits as a judge.  His judging carries with it the authority of one who knows of what he speaks!

As a technical aside, the prints that John used to illustrate his talk were obtained using a Hasselblad Xpan, a coupled rangefinder camera that uses 35mm film but which can produce panoramic images twice the width of those from conventional 35mm cameras.  He does now also use a DSLR and one wonders just how his digital prints turn out.

After the break, Di gave a personal and very different presentation involving the use of projected images that illustrated her photographic journey from her earliest experiences with an entirely manual Pentax SLR through to her more recent experience with a Canon DSLR, the latter of which has re-ignited her enthusiasm for photography.  Pressures on her time mean that most of her images are created during holidays but she has a distinctive style featuring, for example, selected landscape detail and a muted colour palette.

This was a truly enjoyable evening and there were many there to savour it.

Malcolm Bowditch

There is to be a ‘Match a PDI’ competition against Gillingham CC at 19.30h on Friday, 9th December, at Wyke Primary School, Dean Avenue, Gillingham, Dorset, SP8 4SH!  We do not yet know who the judge is to be. Similar events (using slides) have always been great fun in the past and doubtless this will be no different.

This particular event has been arranged primarily in order to check out our recently acquired software.  So, if you want a laugh, turn up at Gillingham and support the club.

Eric Langley

Martin Edge visited the club to give an illustrated talk on underwater photography on Tuesday 22^nd November and a goodly crowd turned up for the occasion.  He is well-known to us at Blandford and it was a pleasure to see him again after only three weeks when he last visited in his capacity as a judge.  He is quite famous for his underwater photography and his splendid photographs were accompanied by a commentary revealing intriguing details of his world-wide travel and subterranean experiences.

At the start of the evening he promised us something different in the second half and, after the tea break, he certainly didn’t disappoint when he revealed that he had discovered landscape photography.  In doing so, he joined the rest of us for whom the atmosphere is the normal medium for the transmission of light.  To prove his point, he not only showed us some of his pictures, but also bravely marked them.  Unknown to him, until now, so did I and I can reveal that he was guilty of a degree of under-marking in my view because although he failed to award himself a ten, I gave him two!  (It’s all relative of course, it’s not possible to mark on an absolute scale obviously).  His new-found passion involved the use of slow shutter speeds (and in-camera equivalents) to convey the sense of movement in landscapes and also his discovery of the appeal of the square format – both of which are of course very ‘now’ techniques.

He was clearly fascinated with his new photographic ‘discovery’ and it is always a pleasure to listen to an accomplished enthusiast. We had a good evening.

Malcolm Bowditch

‘The idle Rich returns’ was the title of a talk at the club on Tuesday last by an old club friend and favourite, the eponymous Leo Rich from Salisbury.  The presentation was based on a miscellany of photographic images that he had captured over the years which, combined with his amusing and witty commentary, made for a most entertaining evening for a full house of club members.  The projected images that he showed were in the increasingly unusual form of slides.  He explained that this was the way they were originally captured and indicated that it was therefore entirely reasonable that they should be projected in this way.

Although Leo claimed to be interested in photographing anything that appeals to him, it did become clear in the second half that he has a great ‘feel’ for environmental portraiture, especially of people - including children - indigenous to the various parts of the world that he has visited, particularly the subcontinent.  Although much depends on the viewing circumstances, there is no doubt that projected slides do have a smooth, tonal continuity that is not always evident, it seems to me, in the projected digital images that we now commonly use.  The eyes in particular seem to have a depth and luminosity that is less often seen via digital capture.

Malcolm Bowditch