Deliberately mess it up.

If you came along to last nights meeting you would of been sat there bored, listening to me tell you how to edit your photographs, but wait a minute. I didn’t tell you how to do it. I showed you how I would edit three of my pictures and hopefully started you thinking what you could do to your own work to make it stand out a little.  I didn’t want any of you going away from last nights meeting thinking you had to do exactly what I said. I desperately wanted you NOT to do that and I really hope I succeeded.

I honestly think that everyone should take the pictures they want and edit them (or not) however they want to. They are after all your pictures. But I also think that if you do want to process your pictures you should try and make them the best they could be. If no one else likes what you’ve done to a picture, who cares! As long as your happy with it that’s what counts. But you have to admit it’s nice when someone tells you they like what you’ve created.

You may take something, look at it on the back of the camera and think “well that’s crap”, but I hope that the last two weeks have shown you that no matter how bad it looks on the camera screen it can be turned into a good picture with just a little bit of work. Now that’s not to say that you shouldn’t try and take the best photograph possible and get as much as possible right in camera, but if something goes wrong or you forget to change a setting because your in a hurry then its not the end of the world.

If I can create the picture on the right from the total mess on the left there’s no reason you can’t either! I guess what I’m trying to get you to understand is don’t be afraid to try doing something different when your editing your pictures. See what you can get out of the ones you think are beyond hope. You never know what you’ll get.

David Waters

 
It’s with great sadness that I have to announce the death of David Waters.

David passed away on Wednesday morning after a short illness. He had a great sense of humour and was always willing to help others and give good, honest critique of anyone's photographs. Which, unfortunately, is a rare trait these days.

David's funeral will be held on
Thursday 28th, 1600 Hrs @ Westerleigh Crematorium (map)

Our thoughts and deepest sympathy go out to Theresa and the rest of his friends & family.

Oh I do like to be beside the sea side

On Saturday an intrepid bunch of adventurers, well six of us, went to Weston Super Mare for a stroll along the sea front and to take pictures. It was a camera club outing but it seemed that most of the club decided it wasn’t for them. Which was a shame because the sun was out and the only bad thing was the wind. Although that created a few good photo opportunities and I’m still annoyed that when the wave broke over the sea wall none of us had our camera’s pointed at the cyclist that got soaked.
We all met at the Pier for six o’clock (at least those of us that could tell the time did, mentioning no names, Kevin.) and decided to go along it and see what we could find. After dodging a van and a train, whilst walking along the pier, we got to the far end and wondered if we were going to get blown off it was so windy. We went inside for a bit and then went for some fish & chips. Barrie ordered his food, got a coffee and walked straight past the till only for the girl to come running after him as he hadn’t paid for any of it!
After the meal we strolled along the seafront. Nearly making it to the old Knightstone pier. If you want to know why we didn’t go all the way to the old pier keep an eye on the pictures in the Flickr group pool and you’ll see that we would have had to time it just right to get past a particularly wet section of the footpath. The waves were constantly breaking over the sea wall at one of the narrowest points of the pathway and we all chickened out. Because of the wind we decided to abandon our plans for a bit of Beach light painting and head home.

13 Weeks of Summer, Processing your Photographs

We’ve just finished the first half of our 13 Weeks of Summer course. That’s all the camera and picture taking done. Now we’re about to embark on the mysterious and secretive art of Processing and Editing your pictures. This is where quite a lot of people get stuck. They put their photographs on the computer and just sit there staring at the screen wondering what to do next. To get us started we asked you all what software you used to edit your pictures and I’m glad to say not a single person said Microsoft Paint! So armed with our list of software we are going to attempt the impossible and try to give you all a taste of how you can edit a picture in most if not all of the editing suites.

For next week all you need to bring along is yourself, a notepad & pen and make sure your brains are plugged in as, unfortunately, it’s going to be more talking than doing for the first week. We’ll be starting at the basics with how to take your pictures off of your camera and put them onto your computer. Also the age old argument of RAW vs. JPG will get an airing. There’s lots of other subjects being covered on Thursday including, workflow, suggestions on file structure, colour space, metadata and keywords.

Don’t worry if you think it’s all going to be technical and far too complicated to understand. It will be explained in easy to understand English and not Technobabble!

Our Newsletter

Over the last couple of weeks I’ve been testing out a new style newsletter. A few of our subscribers volunteered to receive the new version and give me feedback on it. It’s now very close to coming out of testing and taking the place of the old text based version. In preparation for this there is now a new page on this Blog that you can use to subscribe to it if you aren’t already. If you look to the left you can see the link to that page called “Sign up to our Newsletter”.

From now on you don’t need to be a member of Reflex Camera Club to receive it. Anyone can subscribe, although there may be editions that you won’t receive if your not a club member. You’ll also find that by changing to this new style we will now be complying with Anti-spam laws from various countries around the world.

What’s different? I’ll be able to include lots more pictures, video’s and information. So instead of just reading about it and having to click on a link to see a poster or picture that’s relevant to the writing, you’ll be able to see them right inside the newsletter. When you get the first issue you may find that the pictures aren’t showing and you just have a bit of text instead of a picture, if that happens you need to add the address the newsletter is sent from to your allowed list. In a lot of email programmes, including web based email, you will see something that asks if you want to allow pictures to be shown from our email address. Please click allow, yes or always allow. Whichever of those options it gives you.