Musselburgh Camera Club was successful on Sunday 12th March at the inter-club 9 way competition which was held at the mining museum, Newtongrange and organised by Beeslack Camera Club. The clubs from all over the Lothians, Lanarkshire & the Borders all submitted 5 images in each category. 
The club held a six point lead after the first round which consisted of printed images and the lead was consolidated in the second round which was Digital Images, congratulations to all concerned.
I have posted some comments about the black and white print competition on the web site.
This Thursday, 11th February 2016, we have the Winter Scene Digital Knockout Competition. This is a break from the usual competition format. There is no judge, and the winner will be decided by popular vote. A prize will be awarded to the winner on the night.
If you would like to enter, please bring along one digital image (sized to 1400 pixels on the longest side as usual) on a CD or data stick. Alternatively, if you email your image to George Todd, or to me, we will bring them with us on the night. If you are bringing your own image, please come a few minutes early so we can load them onto the laptop before we start.
See you on Thursday. Come along and join the fun.
Steven
This week you will notice a difference in the way that the “Chairman’s Comments” are distributed. From this week onwards, my ramblings about each club meeting will now be added to a regular page on the web site. These pages are not emailed to everyone, but you can still find them on the web site. For example, my comments from our AV meeting at Beeslack can be found here. Club news and announcements will be still be posted when needed. You should receive fewer and shorter emails, and important news won’t be lost underneath a long description. Apologies for the inconvenience while the club web site is reorganised. Comments and suggestions are welcome.
This Thursday, 4th February, is the submission deadline for the “Dereliction” set subject competition. Please send your digital entries to George Todd, or bring them along on Thursday on a CD or USB stick. Remember to resize your images to 1400 pixels on the longest side and rename your files to show member number and title.
See you on Thursday for our Black and White print competition.
This week we had the first of our three set subject competitions, judged by Jennifer Davidson. There were 60 images submitted altogether, showing members’ different interpretations of the theme of “coast”; including abstract images of sand patterns, seaweed or sea shells, coastal wildlife, portraits of people enjoying seaside activities, and landscape images of the rocky coastline, castles and lighthouses. All the images submitted were well captured and imaginative, and even the images which had distractions or Photoshop problems could be improved by cropping or reprocessing. The top images were:
but the most talked about image was:
because it included a coastal signpost with the word “Grunt”!
The top scorers were:
Mike wins an AO-sized print of an image of his choosing. The scores will be carried forward to the next set subject competition (themed “Dereliction”) on 25th February.
Next week there are two club meetings:
Some other announcements:
Welcome back everyone to our first session in 2016. We started 2016 with a CD of competition images prepared by the Wigan 10 Foto Club. Wigan 10 are a small club who do well in external competitions, and we saw some captioned examples of their competition entries from 2006 onwards. There were common themes: sporting events, landscapes, portraits, and many images of Camargue horses. It was interesting to see how ordinary-looking portraits could be improved with a new background, or how landscapes could be dramatically improved by replacing the sky and adding a moody contrast. It was also interesting to see how the technical quality of digital images has improved over the last 10 years.
Next week (14th January) we have our first set subject competition, on the theme of “COAST”. Everybody should now have sent or given their digital entries to George Todd. Image files should be renamed so the member number and title are part of the filename: for example, 56_HereIsMyTitle.jpg. (Some members had a problem preserving the filename when emailed. That might be caused by having blanks in the file name. It is safer to use “_”.)
Next week is also the closing date for the black and white print competition. Please bring 3 mounted prints.
Diary Dates:
See you this Thursday.
This week we hosted the first 4-way inter-club competition of the 2015/2016 season. Members from Edinburgh Photographic Society, Haddington Camera Club and Stirling and District Camera Club visited us. 60 digital projected images (15 from each club) were judged by Dougie Allen of Beeslack Camera Club. Whether to crop was the most common comment: Do you need that extra piece of sky? Does that stick on the left hand side add or detract from the image? The artistic merits of each image were compared: Are those gravestones dark enough? Is the subject sufficiently distinguished from the background? Musselburgh’s entries held up well against the competition, but Stirling clinched it with some stunning, top-mark images. Joe’s action shot of the motorbikes was our highest marked image. Well done, Joe. The final result was:
Thank you to Jennifer Davidson, George Todd and Liz Sowler for arranging the catering (and to my wife, Elizabeth for baking brownies for the occasion).
This was the last meeting at the Fisherrow Centre until the New Year. Next week, 17th December, we will be meeting at the Ravelston House Hotel in Musselburgh for the MCC Christmas social evening. Dinner is booked for 7:30pm, but we will meet in the hotel bar from 7pm onwards. Here is the location of the hotel on a Google map.
On Tuesday, 29th December, some members will be meeting at 3:30pm at the Scottish Cafe in Princes Street Gardens to photograph the Edinburgh Christmas lights. Details in Liz’s recent post.
Things to think about over the Christmas holidays:
For any members not coming to the social evening, I wish you a very Merry Christmas and Happy New Year, and I’ll see you at the next meeting at Fisherrow on 7th January 2016. (I am volunteering to make the tea that evening.)
Our meeting on 3rd December didn’t happen as planned. To start with, we learned of a mix-up with the intended venue for the meeting when it was too late to tell everyone in person. Thank you to Liz for sending out the change of venue notices. Apologies to any members who came to Fisherrow and discovered too late that the venue had been changed to Beeslack in Penicuik. You didn’t miss much, though, because the poor weather, and an accident on the A701, conspired to prevent most of us reaching Penicuik. I heard that some members were stuck in the traffic for several hours. I hope you all managed to get home safely. Thank you for trying. A big “thank you” to Anita for warning us of the traffic, and to Gavin for driving Liz, Iwona and me out of the traffic in his 4×4 through the snowy streets of Loanhead. I expect we will all have stories to tell the next time we meet up.
I heard from the Beeslack club secretary that only 8 members made it to Penicuik, but they were treated to an outstanding presentation by Ron McCombe and his wife (who made it from Hawick despite several of the roads through the Borders being closed). Beeslack wished all our members a safe journey home and said they would keep the pile of uneaten sandwiches and cakes for the Audio Visual night on 28th January!
I hope everyone who would like to go to the Christmas social evening on 17th December has signed up with Joe and paid their deposit.
I am assured that this Thursday’s 4-way competition will be at Fisherrow. We are hosting Edinburgh, Haddington and Stirling camera clubs. It starts at the usual time of 7:30pm and will be in the large room at the back of the Fisherrow Centre. Walk down the corridor past the room where we normally meet and turn left. Besides the competition, there will be a chance to share cakes and sandwiches with members of the other clubs. I look forward to seeing you all and exchanging our stories.
This week Steve McGonnell of the Edinburgh Photographic Society judged the MCC Human Portrait print competition. Steve had written a detailed set of notes for each image, and gave each one a comprehensive critique. Distracting backgrounds were a common theme (watch out for background lines which cut through the subject’s head). Plain backgrounds or backgrounds which compliment the subject were preferred. Steve felt that eyes were an important part of a portrait, and the position of the eyes in the frame, the direction of the gaze, the expression in the eyes or the brightness of the eyes were often mentioned. There were some otherwise good images which, unfortunately, suffered from printing faults or had distracting colours. The top image was a beautifully-presented, silky-textured portrait with a great contrasting background called “Jasmine”. The top three images were:
When the scores were added up, the placings were:
Thank you to everyone who entered, and well done to Charlie, Jennifer and the other winners.
Our next competition will be the “Coast” set subject competition, which will be judged by Jennifer Davidson on 14th January 2016. The syllabus says that images must be submitted by 10th December, but Jennifer is happy for members to submit their images by 7th January 2016. So we all have the Christmas holidays to capture some more images.
Next week we have a presentation on wildlife photography by Ron McCombe. Ron gave us a presentation last year that was so good that we decided to ask him back. This time his presentation is being held at Beeslack Camera Club in Penicuik. Meet at the Fisherrow Centre at 7pm if you would like a lift. If you have your own transport, go to Beeslack High School, Edinburgh Road, Penicuik, EH26 0QF and aim to be there for 7:30pm. Come along and be inspired.
In Before and After, Club member Joe Fowler gave a very interesting and helpful talk on how he approaches landscape and sports photography; and buildings and bison. He described how the camera struggles to record light and dark areas accurately and can be helped by the use of an ND (neutral density) grey graduated filter to reduce light from the sky. He showed landscapes of Scotland and talked us through the choices he made when taking the photographs and the Photoshop tools he used to improve them. As a well known cycle nut the next section covered how to get good images of bike racers including shots of the Tour of Britain as it climbed up the the Lammermuir Hills. Motor cycling and extreme sports were next with demonstrations of the use of relatively simple Photoshop techniques to combine elements of several images. The use of brush tools to dodge and burn ( lighten and darken ) areas was a key technique using very low opacity < 10% and a soft brush of varying diameters depending on the area under treatment. A loose Lasso tool with a feathered edge, to select areas for editing, avoids fiddly tedious cutting out of selections. The important point he made was that you learn to use Photoshop by experimenting and finding out why works for you.
What a great evening we had yesterday. Lee Howell enthralled us with video-based presentations showing how he creates the most amazing digital art using Photoshop. Art that is sufficiently innovative that Adobe chose his work to advertise their Creative Cloud! Anyone who missed the evening can see his work on his web site (www.leehowellphotography.com). The videos he showed us are available here (and on YouTube). Lee describes himself as an “image maker” as well as a professional photographer. He uses his photography to build a collection of shots with which he assembles his digital images. Lee uses photographs and Photoshop in the same way an artist uses paint and a paint brush. Models are given elaborate hair pieces made from feathers copied from photographs of birds! Stark African scenes are conjured from plain-looking portraits taken in Edinburgh. The most impressive part of Lee’s work for me was seeing how he made a consistent lighting pattern by carefully dodging and burning, paying careful attention to tiny details.
Lee is inspired by the work of Annie Leibovitz, Romain Laurent and Irwin Olaf. He took up digital image creation as a way of recovering “the one that got away”. If you see the perfect shot in front of you but miss it, remember the moment and digitally recreate the elements that made that shot work. Lee revealed some of the Photoshop techniques that he uses in his work:
Photoshop Workshop?
I will be giving a Photoshop presentation on 31st March 2016. If anyone has been inspired by Lee’s work and would like to learn more about Photoshop earlier than then, I would be happy to start a Photoshop workshop on a mutually convenient evening. If you are interested, please let me know.
Musselburgh Riding of the Marches
The Club has been invited to participate in the exhibition of “Musselburgh Life” at Loretto Primary School as part of the 2016 Musselburgh Riding Of The Marches. We need to collect about 40 images connected with Musselburgh or Fisherrow. The display is scheduled for July 2016, but we need to tell the RoM commitee what we intend to display by the end of January. Please look into your image collections, digital or prints, or perhaps be inspired to take some new photographs in and around Musselburgh or Fisherrow. We may display some pictures of Club members in action !
Diary Dates
NEXT WEEK
Joe Fowler has the unenviable task of following on from Lee Howell. Joe will show us how to turn dull and unexciting shots into good images. Joe’s presentations are a must-see for newcomers, or anyone wanting to improve their photography skills.
Musselburgh Camera Club 
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