Just a reminder that our club has been invited to take part in the Knox Interclub competition on Wednesday the 22nd of July 2009.

The competition will be for “Novice Small Prints”, “Large Prints” and “Digital Electronic Projected Images” . It is an OPEN competition, but restricted to MONOCHROME only. Each club may enter 5 in each category.

The judging night will be at Boronia West Primary School, Tormore Road, Boronia. 3155. Melway 64 J8. (Near the Knox swimming pool) starting at 8pm and followed by supper.

All Prints should be mounted. Prints must be identified with a title, Club name and maker.

We will select 5 large prints from those entered in the recent 4-club and VAPS competitions. If you had a monochrome print in one of these competitions, please bring it to our next meeting.

There is a great oppprtunity for members to enter Novice Small Prints (Maximum mount size 8×10 inches – maximum image size 5×7 inches). We will seek interest at our next meeting.

Digital Electronic Projected Images will be selected from entries to our recent EDI competions.

WCC held its May Competition last night, Tues 5th May 2009.

This was an ‘open’ competition with no set subject. The standard of entries was outstanding, an opinion fully endorsed by the visiting judge, Duane Eaks from the Ivanhoe Photographic Society. Duane said that the standard of images was superb and he was very impressed with all of the entries.

The new format of meeting went really well.

Pete Myers kicked the evening off with an explanatory talk about our blog and gallery. The half time break between judging session was a huge success with a packed house chatting and discussing images etc. In fact the only complaint in the entire evening was that all the milk had been used and there wasn’t much left for Pete to take home.

Three new members joined last night, so a warm Waverley Camera Club welcome goes to Rodelle Keogh, Mary McLean & Natalie McKinna. We also had three “guests” last night all who enjoyed the evening and said they too would look to become members.

Well done to last night’s winners, Pete Myers (B Grade Print), Vicki Moritz (B Grade EDI), Ross Garner (A Grade Print) and Leif Anderson (A Grade EDI).

B Grade Print – Better Days – Pete Myers

Pete said “I wanted to try and conjour up an image of this beautiful old plane flying in years gone by. The stormy cloud background and the grey on grey appearance all added to the feel…”.

A Grade Print – Trainee Monk – Ross Garner

Ross said, “The picture was taken in Bhutan, which is located between China and India in the Himalayas. Buddhism is the country’s religion and it is auspicious for boys to study in a monastery. This study is rote learning of Buddhist teachings and prayers. The trainee monk was comfortable in having his picture taken (I asked first) and I purposefully didn’t want a toothy smile, but more of a reflective expression. Including the prayers was also important”.

B Grade EDI – Mornington Evening – Vicki Moritz

Vicki said “The image was taken in Mornington, Snapper Point Drive. It was a still mid April evening, so my son and I took off for a costal photo shoot . The image is timed at 7.43, just after dark. 3 exposures given some subtle treatment in Photomatix/Photoshop to bring up the colours in the rocks and sky. I liked the way the rocks framed the view of part of Mornington and provided a bit of foreground interest”.

A Grade EDI – In The Mirror – Leif Anderson

Leif said “Print is take in Flinders Street-Swanston Street intersection looking east with St.Pauls Cath. to the left. The Mirror is for the drivers use to see if platform is clear”.

Just a quick note from the President regarding the next club meeting and open competition on Tuesday 5^th May 2009.

This Tuesday before we get into the competition proper we will be demonstrating how the new online galleries and blogs work. Doors will be open at 7pm and we will be starting this demo shortly after.

ALSO: PLEASE DONT FORGET THAT THE JUNE COMPETITION ENTRIES ARE DUE THIS TUESDAY.

See you then if I don’t see you on Sunday.

Water’s Edge, was judged by our own Tuck Leong, he said that “The entries for April’s competition were of a high standard; unfortunately quite a few did not comply with the Month’s set subject – Water’s Edge”. Below are a the four winners from each of the categories, congratulations to Ron, Ross, Vicki and Warren.

A Grade Print – Ron Weatherhead ” Water’s Edge ”

Tuck said, the winning print is a colourful yet simple composition of waves against rocks and a ramp leading into the water. The image reveals craftsmanship in the taking of the photograph and in the making of the print. Ron added, I took this photograph near Cape Conran in Gippsland. When I saw that the club’s competition was to be “Water’s Edge”, I thought that this image fitted the bill. I liked the colour of the rocks and the sea, the pier leading into the deep added perspective.

B Grade Print – Vicki Moritz ‘Lough Derg’

Tuck said, a lovely print was presented of a row of blue boats amongst the reeds. The overall tones are harmonious with the saturated colour of the boats drawing attention to their position along the water’s edge. Vicki added, Lough Derg is a large body of water in Ireland along the Shannon River near Portumna. This pretty much typified the week of summer weather we experienced- I don’t think the boats were launched that week! It was taken with Canon 40D with EFS 17-85 f4 lens, handheld.

A Grade EDI – Ross Garner ‘Tree and Lake’

Tuck said, the warm directional light revealed the organic form of the overhanging limbs of a tree against dark rippling water. Whilst the water’s edge is not visible, it is implied by the tree limbs leaning across the water.

B Grade EDI – Warren Knower ‘Reflection’

Tuck said, the top image consists of a monochrome image with delicate tonality. The over-hanging branches traced a filigree design and reinforced by the strong graphic lines of the rush from the bank. Warren added, the photograph was taken one afternoon on a dreary winter’s day in the Queen Victoria Gardens. I find the reflections fascinating and along with the reeds they tend to disorientate the viewer on which way is up.

The WCC August competition subject is ‘Still Life’ and I have been approached on a couple of occasions to define what ‘Still Life’ actually means. Well it just happens that the Digital Photography + Design magazine had the very same question asked of them. Therefore I have used the same answer as they did to define what ‘Still Life’ is and you can find it as described below, published in the pages of Wikipedia.

A still life (plural still lifes [1]) is a work of art depicting mostly inanimate subject matter, typically commonplace objects which may be either natural (food, flowers, plants, rocks, or shells) or man-made (drinking glasses, books, vases, jewellery, coins, pipes, and so on) in an artificial setting. With origins in ancient times and most popular in Western art since the 17th century, still life paintings give the artist more leeway in the arrangement of design elements within a composition than do paintings of other types of subjects such as landscape or portraiture. Still life paintings, particularly before 1700, often contained religious and allegorical symbolism relating to the objects depicted. Some modern still life breaks the two-dimensional barrier and employs three-dimensional mixed media, and uses found objects, photography, computer graphics, as well as video and sound.

Courtesy of Wikipedia

A brief but informative introduction to 4-Club from the WCC President, Pete Davies.

There are competitions being run outside of WCC’s monthly comp and lots of photography clubs get together and stage inter club competitions. Waverley is involved in one known as 4 Club, every six months (usually April and October) we join up with Berwick Viewfinders, Eastern Suburbs Photographic Society and Maroondah Photographic Society. The clubs take turns to host the event and Waverley does it in April during the odd number years and when Waverley is not hosting the 4 Club it receives a letter from the host club asking for entries.

We are invited to enter 6 colour, 6 monochrome and 6 digital prints. There is an individual medal given to the maker of the best entry in each class while all the scores are tallied up in each section and the top club in each section is awarded a trophy. Last time around Waverley won everything except for one trophy. Can we do it again? Come along and see.

When you see 4 Club Selection Night listed in the program bring along some prints and or digital for everybody to have a look at. General consensus decides which entries are chosen and we try to spread the entries between as many makers as possible. When we do host the 4 club comp we move into the Community Centre on the corner of Stephenson’s Road and Miller Crescent. If you look out of the kitchen window in Wadham House and across the car park you are looking at the Community Centre.

Please bring a plate of food with you and arrive early as we need some equipment carted across to the Community Centre.

As a final favour could I ask you all to make an effort to introduce yourselves to at least one person that you do not recognise? The whole point of these interclub comps is to get out there and share the love so to speak. Everybody there is there because they all share a common passion so why not spread it around?

Pete Davies WCC President

Just to follow up on the President’s email, here a re a few points from the new competition rules for 2009.

As you all should know by now there has been some changes to the competition rules (A and B grades, 2 entries instead of three) and now the committee have introduced a couple more.

The first and most significant change is to the deadline.

Instead of the competition entries being due at the 3rd Tuesday workshop night, they will now be due anytime up to the competition PRIOR to the one you are entering. For e.g. If you want to submit entries to the June competition, they would be due no later than the 5th May’s competition night.

Entries for the May competition are still due on the 21st of April, this change will come into effect for the June competition onwards.

The reason for this is that there are now more camera clubs than ever before, with more members than ever before (and increasing memberships at that) putting in more comp entries than ever before. The judges, whose numbers haven’t swelled accordingly, are being inundated with requests and are, quite simply, swamped. As a committee we felt that more time given to the judge could only be of benefit to all concerned. Until now Waverley have given the judge a week to 10 days to do their critiquing before coming in to the club. Adding two weeks to that not only releases a little of the pressure we place on Albert and Peter to collate all the entries as soon as possible but should result in more considered commentary from the judge, which is, after all, the point of the competition in the first place.

The second change is that from now you must submit a digital copy with every print that you enter.

The reason for this is that we will be using the back room for the judging and putting the prints up around the front room for perusal before the judging starts. It’s too much trouble to run between the rooms grabbing prints for the judge to comment on so we decided that we would display the digital copy of the print instead. One immediate benefit of doing it this way is that from now on everybody should be able to see the (digital) print. Reflections from the lights overhead will not be a problem.

The file naming covention will be almost the same as for the EDI comp – just put a P (for print) between WCC and your grade.
For example B graders will be: WCCPB-0609-25B-Title.

The third item is conformation of the new aggregate scoring system.

No longer will a judge be required to give a score out of 15 (except for 4 Club). Instead a judge will be asked to award as many merits and highly commended awards as the judge feels are warranted. The judge will be asked to nominate one entry from each of the four sections as the best of the month.

• Every entry receiving a merit will get 2 aggregate points.
• Every entry receiving a highly commended will get 3 aggregate points.
• Each entry nominated as the best of the month will receive 1 extra aggregate point.

For the end of the year aggregate awards the winner will be the person in each section (A prints, B prints, A EDI and B EDI) with the most aggregate points.

In the event of a tie the winner will be the person who received the highest number of highly commendeds.

If things are still tied the winner will be the person who received the most nominations as the best of the month.

For the annual aggregate competition these aggregate points will reset to 0 at the start of each calendar year.

A person will be promoted to A grade once they have accumulated 30 aggregate points. This person does not have to accumulate all of these points in one calendar year. For promotion purposes a record will be kept of how many points a person has accrued since joining the club.

If a B grader accumulates enough aggregate points to be promoted to A grade before the July comp then that person shall immediately be promoted and shall carry over any aggregate points earned in that calendar year. If a B grader accumulates enough aggregate points to be promoted any time from the July comp onwards then that person’s promotion shall be held over until the start of the next calendar year.

Our club has been invited to take part in the Knox Interclub competition on Wednesday the 22nd of July 2009. Entries close on 8th July. We will need to decide on entries at our meeting on June 16th, or earlier.

The competition will be for “Novice Small Prints”, “Large Prints” and “Digital Electronic Projected Images” and is restricted to MONOCHROME only. Each club may enter 5 in each category.

The judging night will be at Boronia West Primary School, Tormore Road, Boronia. 3155. Melway 64 J8. (Near the Knox swimming pool) starting at 8pm and followed by supper.

Only Monochrome work is eligible. A single all over toning is acceptable. THERE IS NO SET SUBJECT – it is an OPEN COMPETITION.

All Prints should be mounted. Prints must be identified with a title, Club name and maker.

Large Prints – Maximum mount size for large prints is 16×20 inches (print size optional)

Novice Small Prints – Maximum mount size for small prints is 8×10 inches with a maximum image size of 5×7 inches.
Not compulsory, but recommended that the mount be 8×10 inches.

Digital Electronic Projected Images – Images must be saved as JPEG files and in the sRGB colour space with maximum pixel dimension of 1024 wide x 768 high.

Pete Davies has kindly sent some instructions on preparing your images for EDI submission.

These instructions are for Photoshop, I apologise if you dont have PS but the theory is the same and the actual instructions should be similar whatever program you use.

If you want to enter some pictures in the digital comp at Waverley CC then here is what you do.

First select the photo you want to enter and do all the work in Photoshop that you would normally do to it, such as cropping, straightening etc…

NOW SAVE YOUR WORK. This is very important. Up until now you have been working on an image that is roughly 8 x 12 inches (depending on your camera) and if you continue on with the steps we are about to do without saving you will end up with an image that is too small to print should you decide you ever want to do so.

Have you saved your image? Good. Don’t close the file because we are about to resize it so that it conforms to the PI rules.

For this example lets say that the image you have just saved is 8 x 12 inches in size at a resolution of 300 pixels/inch. That would be perfect to print out and frame but it’s too large a file for the PI comp.

At 300 pixels/inch an image which is 8 inches high is 2400 pixels high. (8 x 300 = 2400)
And so an image which is 12 inches wide is 3600 pixels wide. (12 x 300 = 3600)
So in terms of pixels your image is 2400 x 3600.

The digital projector we use can only output 1024 pixels across and 768 pixels from top to bottom. This 1024 x 768 resolution is known as xga resolution and is based on the same number of pixels found in the old crt monitors. As technology improves and becomes more affordable we will probably move to High Definition which is 1920 x 1080 pixels but for the foreseeable future 1024 and 768 are the numbers you need to know.

To resize your large image go to the IMAGE menu in the tool bar and scroll down to IMAGE SIZE. If you are using a newer version of PS the short cut is Alt+Ctrl+I. A new dialogue box will open up and it’s in here that we make the necessary changes.

For the example I am using an image which is 8 inches high x 12 inches wide and 300 pixels/inch.

Make sure that the constrain proportions box and the resample image boxes are ticked. You will find these boxes at the bottom left of the dialogue box. Having these boxes checked will ensure that when the picture is resized both dimensions will be resized proportionally thus maintaining the picture’s aspect ratio.

To make this file smaller go to the top part of the dialogue box marked pixel dimensions and change the width figure of 3600 to 1024. Doing this will automatically change the height figure to 683 pixels.

Once you have changed the width to 1024 pixels go to the drop down box at the very bottom of the dialogue box. It probably says Bicubic. If you are using a newer version of PS you will have the option of Bicubic Smoother and Bicubic Sharper. If you do then choose Bicubic Sharper. If Bicubic is the only choice you have then that’s fine.

You will notice that the image is now 3.413 inches wide and 2.276 inches high and if you look at the top of the dialogue box you will see that the file size is now 2.00M. Before the resizing it was 24.7M so it is a significantly smaller file.
Why is the image now 3.413 inches wide I hear you ask? Well the image is now 1024 pixels wide still with 300 pixels per inch. 1024 divided by 300 equals 3.413. Too small to be printed but perfect for what we want.

Click OK to make the change. The dialogue box will disappear and the file on screen will appear to shrink in size. Hit Ctrl+0 (zero) to maximise the file on screen. Have a good look at the picture and make sure you are happy with it. When you are SAVE AS.

DO NOT SAVE.

SAVE and SAVE AS operate slightly differently. Choosing SAVE AS will create a new file which is what we want because we do not want to lose the large 8 x 12 file which we may want to print someday.

A new dialogue box will appear when you choose SAVE AS. Select the location where you want this new file to be kept.

Name the file like this:
WCCxxyy-MM-Title.jpeg where xx is the month of the competition, yy is the year and MM is the members two digit membership number.

For example Pete (who is member number 14) wants to enter the June comp in 2009 with a picture called ”Stunner” and another picture called ”Awesome”.
He would name his files like this:

WCC0609-14B-Awesome.jpeg

The A after the member number is simply the first of his two allowed images and B is the second.

Under the FORMAT drop down box select jpeg.

Hit OK to save.
When you do this another dialogue box will appear asking you how much compression you want to apply to the file. Choose a number from 10 to 12 in the quality box and hit OK.

That’s it! You’re done.

All you have to do now is email your pictures to comp@waverleycameraclub.org before the deadline.

Up to 2 images can be submitted per comp and they can be either colour, monochrome or creative/experimental. There is only one digital comp which means that all styles will be competing against each other.

In the example above the final image size turns out to be 1024 x 683 pixels. It’s not 1024 x 768 but that’s absolutely fine. If we were to make the image 768 pixels high it would scale the side to side measurement to 1151 pixels across which is too big and will be rejected. If you have a picture that is portrait format then the process is exactly the same except when you change the pixel dimensions. Instead of changing the width as we did in the example above we have to change the height.

As a rule of thumb you should always change the longest dimension. If the longest dimension is the width that means the picture is in the landscape format and you should change the pixel dimension to 1024. If the height is the longest dimension then you need to change it to 768 pixels high. If you follow the steps outlined above then a 2400 pixel (8 inch wide) x 3600 pixel (12 inch high) image will be scaled down to 768 high x 512 wide. Where it gets a little tricky is when you have an image which is square or nearly square. If your image is square then you will need to resize it to 768 pixels high. This will result in an image which is 768 x 768. If you resize it to 1024 x 1024 it will be rejected for being too large.

The maximum size for any image is 1024 wide x 768 high.

Pete Davies

Don Boyle, one of our club members has suggested that fences could be an interesting competition subject, please read on and decide for yourself. Please vote in the mini poll for ‘Fences’ as a future competition subject.