The AGM and It’s a Knockout competition, Tuesday 5th February 2019

Hi Folks,

Quite a large turn out for the AGM last night which has now been moved to earlier in the season to allow members accepting new committee positions to shadow the current committee member for four months before taking over the role.

Kathy our chairperson opened the evening by saying the club had grown and she was particularly pleased with how our summer programme had gone also mentioning the events of the barn owl evening, a club member’s garden visit, and the Eythrope walk with Lawrence the star of the evening. Also the windy evening arranged at Brill with the models and the Aylesbury walk to finish the summer season.

We had practical evenings learning the basics of photography, cameras, having painting with lights, Exposure and water capture evenings.

Critique nights where we are now all getting better at recognising faults in our images and changing them using software.

Competition nights where we can see our progress measured and the showing of the high level Rosebowl competition event in which the club takes part.

Kathy said  perhaps we should as a club enter more outside competitions. There is the Chiltern Exhibition coming up shortly where if one enters three prints at least one print is guaranteed to be put up on the wall for all to see at Queen’s Park.

Chris on the Club’s Programme

Chris said, he looks for variety in a programme and tries to get a balance. The exposure night was a eye opener to Chris where everyone was so willing to learn and help each other. If anybody attends another club and sees something which is different please let him know. Also Chris is looking for ideas for the summer months and if anybody has ideas on places or loop walks that can be done by the club please contact him.

Kathy holds the committee meetings at her house and they can be quite fun. Kathy thanked various members for their help, Carol for doing the catering, Chris for filling in on Kathy’s absence, Julia for her help, Nick doing the projector, Chenxi for doing the outside competitions, Lawrence for keeping control on things and Tami who has acted as a back up doing the blogs for me whilst away. I also thank Tami for doing a super job in keeping them going.

Brian our Treasurer is stepping down so we need a volunteer.

Brian said the club is in a good financial state and we have 43 paid up members. There is a  door charge of £2 for members who have chosen to pay £40 membership. This goes to the cost of hiring the hall, speakers, judges, the website, tea, coffee and biscuits. New potential members will only have to pay the £2 door money for two week to see if the club is for them before perhaps joining and paying the yearly club fee. We may as a club be in a position to order a larger screen if required.

Anybody ordering goods from Amazon could use the club’s link to Amazon which will give the club a small percentage of the order at no cost to the person ordering goods.

Dave the webmaster said there has been no problems with  entry sizes for the competitions this year and all is working well.

The club has had to produce a new constitution to maintain a club bank account. Lawrence has kindly been working on it. It was shown to us last night and there was one amendment requested regarding a duty of care by the club of looking after personal data. This is being added to the constitution. The constitution will be sent out in a couple of weeks time for members approval.

On the committee

Kathy Chair Person

Lawrence club secretary

Chris the club’s programme fixtures manager

Steve programme fixtures assistant manager

Chenxi outside competitions including the Chiltern

Carol the catering

Melissa the club publicity

Dave the website

Nick internal competitions

 

Coffee time

 

After coffee there was not a great deal of time left but we had one round of  the ‘It’s a knockout’ competition.

The club was divided into two teams depending on where each member was seated.

Eighty images were selected from our club’s past competitions and were divided between two laptops, projectors and screens

Each team had to show a chosen image on the projectors at the same time.

Alan our resident judge gave his verdict on the best one of the two shown.

 

At the end of the evening team B had won by 24 point to 16.

 

Next week is

Competition: Club Challenge Round 3