Members Images – Tuesday 3 February
As a change from talks, members, particularly the newer members, were invited to bring along images to be projected by the Digital projector, or else as prints to be illuminated by the Digital projector. The response was good and we had an interesting evening looking at new images and thinking what we would say about them as Judges. To get the ball rolling Tony Redford, Frank Hutchinson and Brian Bower were prevailed upon to make the opening remarks for each image. The image authors were invited to make their own remarks, and the audience generally were invited to join in.
It was immediately obvious that much of the audience were tongue-tied when invited to comment. Apart from saying that one liked or was indifferent to an image, making a suggestion as to how it could be improved is not generally straightforward. In listening to the judge’s comments one could conclude that, with competition pictures, besides trying to make an immediate impact on the judge, the other great art is to remove all the standard objections which might be raised. Is the composition according to the rules? Are there distracting elements on the edge of the image? Is the main subject large enough and bold enough in the frame? Making the main subject bright and strong with the background paler or out of focus seems to be a standard response. We all seem to be encouraged to use the Gaussian filter to make the background less intrusive. Else a colourful main subject with a monochrome background seems to do the trick.
But the main fun of the evening derives from seeing new images by members and how these members have chosen to present their images.. Brian Turnbull produced several before and after images, inviting the audience to say which treatment they preferred. President Roger Dye ran the evening using Lightroom as his preferred program. He thanked the three judges, and the members for bringing the images and making it another successful evening.
At the conclusion Martin Currie ran a short workshop for new members on resizing images to be digitally projected.