Social and prize giving this Thursday

 Last weeks super fun practical meeting resulted around 40+ of us descending on the streets of the St Annes area in a bid to get photographs to fit the 5 themes we were left by Ruth. The local people were seriously disturbed by us geeky camera carrying brigade and I hear there were a few funny remarks made. Although a few locals were game to helping us out as you will see in the images in a couple of weeks, even the wildlife and teddy bears came out to play and we were treat to a nice sunset as well. I cant wait to see the results. Many thanks to Julie Coombs for helping to arrange the photo rally.

 We have one sneak peek image, taken on the same evening, Myk must have taken an extra card along I think.

This week we have yet another evening of fun scheduelled, but not at the school as per usual, this time we are meeting at the Langton court pub for a night of skittles and prize giving. There will be food provided to give you that extra little bit of energy to play hard at skittles.

Summer is here - image below by Alison Davies

I hope you have all had a chance to get and about in this gorgeous weather with your cameras. I see Andro and Myk certainly managed to capture a lovely sunset at Clevedon and another group of us were out photographing in the beautiful evening light yesterday in south Gloucestershire.  So dont think you have to go out on your own, if you want to team up with others from the group then do shout up at the meetings, or on the Flickr or facebook pages.

Image below by Andro

AGM, Tom Sage and practical session

Lots of things going on with Reflex at the moment, many of which were summed up in last weeks annual general meeting. It looks like the club committee and members have been hard at work behind the scenes with planning and organising the future of the club. If you didnt make it to the meeting (like me - slapped wrists) then please take the time to read our newsletter which outlines a few changes that we all have to look forward to. As a result of feedback from members there are all sorts of new ideas being implemented, offering us a great deal of variety over the year and even more opportunities to get stuck in and participate rather than just sitting in chairs.

This week we are back to our normal meeting day of Thursday and we are expecting a presentation by Tom Sage, a photographer who worked with the Press association on Fleet street for 15 years and then moved on to work with hot air balloons. It should be interesting to hear his experiences of press photography.

We have a little advance info regarding the meeting in two weeks time on May 24th, this will be our last practical session of the season, now at the moment its all top secret and all Ive been told is that we need to bring our cameras and an empty memory card. We will be venturing outside the walls of the school, so you softie southerners will likely need big furry boots, winter coats, hats, gloves scarves ( ha - waiting for the retaliative abuse ). Oh and apparently it would help if we could all be at the club for 7pm that evening, ready to brave the weather by 7:15.

Congratulations to Mark O Grady who has had a print accepted in the London Salon exhibition on his first ever entry, its great to see our members doing well.
Mark o Gradys flickr

Castle Combe Race Track

Great weather, great company and fantastic photo's just about sums up our trip yesterday to Castle Combe Race Track

Around 12 of us made the effort and were rewarded by a brilliant day. We met some very enthusiastic and very friendly petrol heads. Saw some amazing cars and took some amazing pictures.

My day started at 0500 when I got up and went down to see the Super Yacht Mogambo sailing out of Bristol Harbour along with Mike Garton.

Then we headed up to Castle Combe for the Great Western Sprint. When we arrived there were already lots of fellow club members wandering around and taking pictures.

I’d like to take this opportunity to thank Dan for volunteering to organise this months trip and booking the fabulous weather. If you want to see more pictures from our day out they should be appearing in our Flickr Group over the next few days.

Picture by Ian Combs (all rights reserved, please do not reproduce without written permission)

10x10

Now if your a member of the club you probably looked at the title of next weeks meeting and wondered just what the hell it meant. I suppose that we really should explain it to you although it really is very simple. All we want is for some of you to volunteer to show around 10 images that you’ve taken and give a little talk about them. Ideally the talk and showing the images should last about 10 minutes. Hence the title 10x10. If you don’t feel like talking then maybe you could just show us the pictures. Please don’t be shy about this, after all you put your images up on Flickr for people to admire so why not put them up on the screen at the club, sit back and enjoy the “ooh’s”, “ahh’s” and “Wow’s” as each image is shown!

You can either bring the pictures in on a memory stick or, preferably, send them in via Dropbox. Go on give it a go you know you want to.