Interactive and Informal Review on Members’ Images, Tues 18th October

Hi Folks,

Interactive and Informal Review on Members’ Images, Tues 18^th October

Last night club members could bring along some of their images on memory sticks and ask the advice of our judges on whether improvements could be made to the images. Five or six workstations were set up in the hall each with a laptop.

Chris our chairman gave an introduction to the evening as it was the first time this type of session had been tried out. Chris also said he would like to have any feedback members had on the evening. Critique nights were started last year but this evening’s event would be slightly different and more personalised and working on a one to one basis. However members could sit in and watch the sessions at any of the workstations.

I had several (thousand lol) pictures of flowers, last year Julia commented that she liked one of my efforts of water drops so since then I had been been practising and hopefully getting better images, so I joined her workstation for advice.

Whilst at the work station another member had taken a cracking good photograph of her pet dog and had a slight concern about some hair/fur covering one of its eyes. Using Photoshop Julia showed the member a couple of different techniques on removing hair fur around the eye. One of these methods was to select part of the other eye whilst turning it upside down and laying it over the partly covered one. This method was followed by cloning out end pieces of hair left around the edges of the eye, something one just wouldn’t think of doing without seeing it. More like an operation the super vet would physically attempt on TV lol.

I had photograph of some tree blossom and wondered if it should be cropped and if so where? Julia pointed out that I am in a very challenging field taking flowers as there are so many photographs of flowers out there and they have to be unusual.

She pointed out five areas that Judges consider in a picture, Powerful Composition, Originality, Overall impact, Technical Impact and Artistic Merit, if one’s picture satisfies all five points it has a good chance in competition.

My blossom didn’t meet all the critieria but hopefully my second photograph of water drops has some chance of a good mark after she gave me advice of a tighter cropping and then the straightening of a branch. So hopefully this year for me there will be more improvement to come after picking up information from various sources along with the courses Alan held last year.

It was coffee time

Afterwards I had a look at the other work stations and there were some really good pictures out there being discussed.

Here Alan is giving guidence on the light room software to improve a picture

On this workstation Steve good on street photography is discussing a picture showing the movement of a roundabout in the photograph

Chris giving advice of structures

Finally Julia showed a demonstration of a ‘painting’ software, mentioning it’s a good way of improving skin tones on portrait photography. I had a go at painting a mouse but someone said it looked more like some road kill lol.

This was an attempt by another member but Julia did show us some better examples of its uses.

Hopefully it has given an idea of the evening it would be slightly different at each workstation but could only give comments from the station I mainly attended but thank you to all the judges that helped us out.

So next week it’s the first round of this year’s challenge competition with the theme on ‘Nature’ and ‘Open’.  I’m looking forward to next week and it will be interesting to see if Steve will manage to defend his crown or will there be a new challenger appearing this year?

Club Challenge Round 1