Our club sessions restart in just one week! I look forward to seeing everyone again, and perhaps welcoming some new members along? If you missed our exhibition at the Riding of the Marches last month, there will be another chance to see it on opening night.

Our competitions start earlier than usual this year. The submission date for the Digital Projected Images competition is 8th September 2016, just 2 weeks away. Time to select your images.

We don’t yet have enough images to be able to enter this year’s SPF Digital Championship. If you haven’t yet sent George your two best digital images please do so. We need a minimum bank of 20 images from 10 members.

See you next Thursday.

Steven.

This Thursday, 14th April 2016, we will view and select the images to be included in our exhibition for the 2016 Musselburgh Riding Of The Marches. Please bring along a CD or a USB data stick containing up to 10 of your best or most interesting images of Musselburgh or Fisherrow. The size of the exhibition space has not been finalized yet, but it’s likely we will need up to 40 images. We can show the images in the same way we did for the Pechakucha night and select the best by public vote as we did for the knockout competition.

We also need to prepare our entry for the 2016 SPF Digital Championship. The closing date hasn’t been announced on the SPF web site yet, but we need to have the images ready to go when the upload page opens. Please send your two all time best digital images to George Todd before the AGM.

Information about the Laurie Campbell nature workshops at Edinburgh Zoo can be found here:

http://www.edinburghzoo.org.uk/photography

For those asking me about the “AAOGlimpse” program I used last week to show photographs as a 3-D surface, it can be obtained from this web page:

http://203.15.109.22/local/www/ks/AAOGlimpse.html

This free software was developed by my colleague Keith Shortridge at the Australian Astronomical Observatory. Please acknowledge Keith if you use images generated by this program.

Some members have been asking me about what is going to happen at our next club meeting on 7th April, entitled “Photoshop Advice”. The evening will begin with a presentation about digital photography and its relationship with Photoshop, aided and abetted by a number of props :). Come along if you are curious to know how a digital camera works, and how to get the best from it (even if you don’t use Photoshop). The presentation should (I hope) be useful for both beginners and more advanced users. I am planning to show some Photoshop demonstrations at the end, but this won’t be a 90 minute long workshop. I will be happy to run some Photoshop workshops during the summer for club members who would like to find out more about specific topics, or would like to try some of the techniques on their own images.

By the way, we need volunteers to make the tea this Thursday. Please can whoever arrives first set up the mugs and put the kettle on. If you are planning to bring some milk please let me know, otherwise I’ll bring some myself.

See you on Thursday.

Steven.

For anyone who wasn’t at last Thursday’s meeting and didn’t hear the announcement, the Evening With Musselburgh Art Club will now take place on Thursday, 31st March 2016 in the large upstairs hall at Fisherrow. My Photoshop presentation will now take place on 7th April 2016.

Coming up this Thursday, 17th March 2016, we have our last speaker of the season. Jo McIntyre will talk to us about wildlife photography.

http://www.jomcintyrephotography.co.uk/

http://www.jgwildlifephotography.co.uk/

See you on Thursday,

Steven.

This Thursday, 10th March, will be our PechaKucha Night. The evening was suggested by Jane Renton last year. Jane is unable to take part, due to rehearsals, but she referred me to this web site for information:

http://www.pechakucha.org/   There is a description of how the format works here.

Jane describes it as a “members night with a twist”. If you would like to join in, please bring 20 images that you would like to show and talk about. The key ingredient isn’t the images themselves but the story you have to tell about them. They don’t need to be good images, and they don’t need to be your work (as long as you acknowledge who created them). Examples might include:

• The story of a holiday, special occasion, sporting event or an interesting place.
• A project you are working on.
• A “how I did it” presentation showing how you created a special effect or a special image.
• A set of images with a common theme.
• Images from your family album and/or images of your ancestors.
• Images from a photographer whose work you admire and would like to emulate.
• Something else…?

There are two ways in which you can bring your images:

1. Save your images to a folder (using a name you will recognise) and copy that folder to a USB data stick. Make sure to name your files so the images will display in the correct order when run as a slide show.
2. Create a Powerpoint presentation containing 20 slides and add each of your images to a new slide. Bring your presentation on a USB data stick (again with a memorable file name). If you can programme the presentation to change slides every 20 seconds, so much the better.

20 images x 20 seconds is 6 minutes 40 seconds. If we can change over within 1 minute, there should be enough time for between 10 and 12 presentations. We have never tried this before, so it might be slightly chaotic, but it should be a lot of fun.

Now that all the images for the “abstract” set subject competition have been collected,  we can start gathering images for next year’s SPF Digital Championship. Please search your archives and find TWO of your best ever digital images and send them to George Todd.  Please don’t send an image that you know has been entered into this competition before (although we haven’t entered for years so I doubt there will be many duplicates). Here is a link to some information about that competition:

http://www.scottish-photographic-federation.org/spf-digital-championship

The rules of the competition can be downloaded from here.

P.S. While you are searching for SPF competition images, if you come across any interesting images of Musselburgh or Fisherrow, please save those for the Riding of the Marches exhibition. 🙂

Steven.

It turns out that Musselburgh Art Club were unaware of the joint evening we had advertised in our syllabus for this Thursday, 3rd March. However, they are keen to continue with our annual get-together and have suggested we delay our joint evening by a few weeks (date to be agreed). Ken Sharp has kindly agreed to bring forward his “Members Evening” talk about his trip to Kenya, and will be showing it to us this Thursday. We will be meeting in usual room at Fisherrow.

Some reminders:

• Charlie Briggs is giving a mounting demonstration at Fisherrow on Tuesday, 1st March. The demonstration is not limited to the 5 people who signed up, so if you are interested come along on Tuesday evening. (The time was either 7pm or 7:30pm – ask Charlie which we decided on.)
• The closing date for the “Abstract” set subject competition is this Thursday, 3rd March. Please send your 3 digital images to George Todd. Images should be sized to 1400 pixels on the largest dimension and the files named with member number and title (for example 56_MyDigitalImageTitle.jpg).
• Please can all trophy winners return their trophies to George Todd, so he can arrange for them to be engraved.

Steven.

Last night George Neilson mentioned that the 2016 SPF print championship is taking place on Sunday, 21st February 2016. The event takes place at 10am at the Stirling Court Hotel, Stirling University, Stirling FK9 4LA.
Here is a link to some information for anyone interested.

http://www.scottish-photographic-federation.org/spf-print-championship

Steven.