Our 1st meeting of the month, 3rd April, was 'An Introduction to Music & Sport Photography' presented by Michael Berkeley LRPS. He is a member of Fordingbridge Camera club and works in the Salisbury and surrounding area specialising in music and sport. He explained that the lighting at many of these sporting and music events is usually way out of his control and so it is a continuous challenge to ‘catch the moment' successfully and to isolate the particular point of interest. Amazing sports images captured at a variety of venues such as cricket, football, polo and eventing were on display alongside colourful pictures of various music bands taken at 'The Joiners' venue in Southampton.
Our 2nd April meeting was an in-house workshop evening themed 'Before and After'. Several club members offered to give tutorials on how their particular images had been created or improved using photo-editing programmes. Using a laptop link to our main DPI screen they firstly showed their original out of camera images and then through a series of steps explained how the final picture was achieved - an eye-opening evening! Creative skills included taking several images recorded over a short period of time and merging into a single image, taking several disparate images and creating one complex image and the creation of a modern interpretation of an old master. See the In House Events blog for more details and images
On the 17th April we had the privilege of a presentation of this year's Southampton International print awards and acceptances by Sue Sibley of Southampton Camera Club. She gave us a few tips on how to get our images accepted into this International Exhibition; firstly the image must have immediate 'impact' and then to gain an award there must also be 'detail'. Five of our members were successful in gaining print acceptances at this year's International; Catherine Dashwood (1), Fay Bowles (3), Jim Pascoe (2), Karen Coller (1) and Nicky Pascoe (1), there were also three members who gained acceptances in the DPI section; Catherine Dashwood (2), Jim Young (1) and Paul Berkeley (1). Congratulations to all named.
On 24th April we held the last Open theme in the Round 5 of our DPI League competition and was judged by Jon Mitchell who gave a very rounded critique with his renowned touch of humour thrown in. A very strong collection of images covering birds, dogs and fishermen was whittled to 3 images scoring the perfect 10 and 9 gaining 9.5. Elaine Adkins image ‘New Growth’ was judged the overall winner with ‘Playing Fives’ by Jim Pascoe and ‘Shading from the Sun’ by Clive Hollingshead close joint 2nd.