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A Concatenation of Chadbands | |||
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The 1st Digital meeting of the Session took place at the Poynton Community Centre on the 4th October. Many of our regulars were away, and it fell to Bill Chadband to take this session on Digital Cameras. He received much advice on what not to do. Don’t include any mathematics – it frightens us. Don’t be technical – it will drive people away. Don’t use big numbers (or Jill will go home!!). The cynic might conclude that one should just show the audience how to set the camera to fully automatic; how to turn it on, and give them directions to Jessops who will surely download the pictures for them, and in due course provide prints of the images. But surely the instructions that come with the camera show how to turn it on, and indicate what the various buttons are? The problems come when we don’t understand the significance of the terms used. White balance? Does it measure in grams or ounces? Bill took along his four digital cameras and discussed the merits and disadvantages of each. Three of them were Minoltas (or Konica Minoltas as I guess we must now say. This made it easier to assess the pro’s and con’s. His theme was that good photographers try and get the image perfect at the taking stage, rather than hoping that PhotoShop would rescue a badly executed shot. He argued that 5 or 6 megaPixels was more than adequate for A3 prints; and that more, smaller, Pixels were not necessarily a good thing. Smaller Sensors required smaller focal length lenses and gave inherently greater depth of field. But bigger pixels were inherently less noisy and had a greater basic dynamic range. The ISO number (ASA no?) was in reality a measure of the gain of the amplifier. Saving images as RAW files was only possible with the more expensive cameras (Digital SLR’s ?) but gave certain advantages. One could choice White balance setting or EV compensation, later, at ones leisure. Despite the late holidays of our regulars, an audience of nearly 40, at least half of whom were non-members, got the series off to a good start, with more audience participation that we saw last Session. By one of those flukes of programming, understood only by our President, Milly Chadband was the speaker at the following club meeting, discussing images from an Artist’s viewpoint. Milly brought along a varied selection of her pictures, explaining the evolution of each; and trying to explain what was in her mind as she embarked on a particular project. In general it was the antithesis of copying the photograph, though she used photographs of details as a memory jog. After the tea interval Milly commented on prints of images provided by Club members. We all agreed that Colin’s Pink boat image was weighted too far to the right. Many of the images provided had already been through a judges scrutiny at the first Quarterly, and were duly admired. Tony’s Lowry picture evoked discussion as to whether the figure he had added was necessary, or in the right place. Milly preferred not to have figures dominating the scene. Tony was anxious that the figure should hide the “crack” in the image. An interesting change to our normal run of meetings. Your Focal Corespondent |
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