Chasing the Light - Photography
This fascinating evening, on Tuesday 15th November, comprised of a number of A-V presentations using a digital projector, with Marion Waine and John Rowell explaining the origin of each. The images were accompanied by both mood music and ‘commentary over’. Marion then went into some detail on the importance of the music and the way it was handled. She used a software programme called CoolEdit2000, which has now been taken over by Adobe and renamed Adobe Audition. (It now costs a little over £200). However an alternative ‘freeware’ program’ named Audacity performs similarly. The opening piece, named "‘Gelart" led on to a discussion on the difficulty of finding suitable mood music, on CD’s which were available, and onto copyright problems. One needed a license to play such music to public audiences. We discovered the existence of a Doom & Gloom CD and the value of BBC publications. The more enterprising amongst us saw a great opening for collecting and selling sheep and cow noises. Marion saved her master sound files as .WAV recordings, but converted to the compressed version, MP3, for the final edition. One had to add MP3 to the Audacity software provided (for copyright reasons) but this was simple to do and only had to be done once. Ogg Vorbis was an alternative (equally good) compression system.
John Rowell discussed the general production of an A-V show. He thought Photography answered a basic need to express oneself. He recounted how he had been much influenced by another photographer Galen Rowell, who sadly had died, with his wife, in a plane crash. He had met Galen only once, (and hadn’t told him that they had the same surname!)
In such an engrossing evening the time flew by and we quickly arrived at 10.00pm. Though both speakers invited interruptions with questions, many of us were too involved in listening to attempt to interrupt. Prominent on the screen was the invitation to go to the WEB at www.chasingthelight.co.uk