Happy Christmas

A happy Christmas to you and yours and my best wishes for the coming year. Off on holidays now, so I'll see you in the new year.
Cheers
Allan

Bramleigh Manor Outing

Here's one from the outing:

By Allan Jackson

Member's pictures

Click image to view enlargement

Here are two from John Teece:

This is a great shot of a bird in flight. (I am not sure but it looks like a yellow-billed kite) John has avoided the mistake that many photographers make; that is getting the bird under exposed. This happens because the camera's exposure is influenced by the bright sky and results in the darker bird being recorded as a silhouette.

The way to avoid this is to use the camera's exposure compensation and set it to +1 or so. Problem is though, the bird does not usually hang about for you to fiddle! Comment by Harry Lock.

A tele-photo lens and a wide aperture has ensured the background in this picture is out of focus and does not distract the viewer from the subject. The bird is well placed and the action is there for us to enjoy. Almost as much as this long-crested eagle is enjoying his (or her) meal. - we are a gender sensitive club. Comment by Harry Lock.

Click image to view enlargement

Beyond the last post

It seems that there is more interest in the blog than was apparent from the level of members' participation in it. I reckon that it is worth giving it another try to see what happens, and so here goes....

This blog runs on the blogger system, which is quite useful as a means for one person to communicate to many, but it does leave something to be desired as a means for a group to interact. I have been looking at another alternative which, unfortunately, would mean a change of venue. Yahoo has a facility they call Yahoo Groups, which will allow us to to post our pictures and have discussions.

The good thing about it is that all members can post their pictures and start discussions which would remove some of the burden from me. Before opting to use this blogging system, I did establish a Yahoo Group for the club which you can view here.

I would like everyone's opinions on the change but I think it would be a good idea because, as you will see, you get a free online web album to store your pictures on a major photographic site as well as access to the group site. For example, my test album is here. The steps to getting yours are as follows:

• Click here to got to Flickr and sign yourself up for a free account.
• It is very easy and, during the process, you will choose a username.
• Upload pictures to your album.
• Tell all your friends and relatives the URL address of your album.
• Sit back and bask in the glory of your online album.
  

Why not go ahead and get yourself an album? It will let you show off your pictures to the world even if we do not eventually move away from here. Gaining access to to the group page will be as easy as letting me know the Flickr username you chose.

Please drop me a line with your feelings about the proposed move You could leave a comment by clicking the link below: you will not need to sign up to anything if you choose the anonymous option - just remember to tack your name on the end of your message.

The last post

This is my last post here. It has emerged over the last two months that the club doesn't want a blog and, as quite a lot of work is involved on my part, I decided to stop it. Some members did contribute and I'm grateful.

Christmas Party

Don't forget the Christmas party on Tuesday, 5 November, 2005. It will take place at Hillcrest Sports Club at 7pm. We will take a look at members' pictures with the set subject being 'What is it?' The club will then provide finger snacks and the bar will be open.

Member's picture

Click images to view an enlargement.

Here's one from Jack Fisher:

Happiness by Jack Fisher

The picture of this couple is very well seen and taken and it lives up to its title perfectly. For me, it is a good example of a picture which isn't finished and can be made even better with a few minutes work.


You may not agree with all the steps I have taken. These include cropping, lightening the mid-tones using curves, cloning out the keys in the guy's right hand, sharpening and adding a border. I was working quickly and lightened the sky along with the skin tones. I could have left the sky as it was in the original, or even darkened it some more.

Click images to view an enlargement.

Don't you think the pic is a perfect summary of the relationship between men and women? He's lost in the bliss of the moment and she's very happy too, but has still has her eyes open and fixed on the future.

Sign seen in Swaziland

From Allan. The sign should have said "Road will now go up and down like a roller coaster and wreck your car if you're not very careful".

Pothole crazy

Pat Kernick reckons that this is the last sign you'd want to see after a long journey.

Have you ever had your assorter charged?

Signs like this are easy to find, particularly in smaller towns. It is probably because of the increasing number of foreign traders opening shops and putting up DIY signs, but then you would think that the locals would help them right. Perhaps the locals don't spell too good either!

November 2006 outing

This is just a reminder about our outing to Bramleigh Manor on Sunday, 26 November 2006. Some have already paid Cathy but you are reminded that the charge is R50, for those who have not paid. We are due there at 9am for coffee and muffins and we will have a nice brunch later in the morning. We will be meeting at 5:50am in the car park of the Hillcrest Sports Club (leaving 6am) to combine cars and travel up together. There will be a lot to photograph at the venue and along the way. Directions at the bottom of this message.

As you see, we've got a challenge underway where members have been asked to contribute pictures of signs. Send in a picture of a sign, or anything else, for us to put up here. And there's another thing, puhleeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeze make comments on the pictures or stories you see; its not much fun at all being an online community of one.

Bramleigh Manor Directions - Scenic route

Turn left onto the R103 at about Howick.
Pass Rawdons on the left
Pass Bierfassl
Into Nottingham Road
Turn left onto Loteni / Sani Pass Road
17Km
Left onto D544
4Km
Left to Bramleigh Manor

(Ordinary Route: You can also stick on the N3 and take the Nottingham Road/Mount West turnoff, turn right into Nottingham Road and left at the Lotenti, Sani pass turn-off, as above).

Trees by John Teece

Congratulations Natalie

Natalie Knibbs has come third in a photo competition run by Ezemvelo KZN Wildlife's Rhino Club. Well done that girl, and keep up the good work!! View the competition results here.

Another Sign

A tattered sign, dramatic sky and some fill-in flash.

Wonders never cease

Here's a sign.

By John Teece

Professional lighting

I have found a very interesting site on getting better results with flash. The Strobist site is actually a blog (using the same service as we do) and you can read it here. One of the readers of Strobist is X-Pose, and you can read his tutorial on building a diffuser panel here and view samples of his work here. He describes how he achieved each of his pictures, which makes it especially interesting.

Important note: Looking at other people's pictures is one of the best ways to improve your visual literacy and, thus, your photography. You're highly unlikely to become a good writer if you don't read, and the same applies to photography and looking at pictures. Why is, do you think, that experienced photographers still buy photo magazines and books?

X-Pose mentions the Canon ST-E2 infrared transmitter, which is what we Canon users have to buy in order to be able to move our dedicated camera-top flashes off-camera, but still allow the camera to control the output of the flash. Users of Nikon cameras are luckier because most of their camera bodies have wireless flash control built-in.

MEMBER CHALLENGE

Send in your pictures of signs to me at the usual e-mail address.

Sign of the times by Allan Jackson

PS Elements 5.0 review

Last week I wrote a short review of Photoshop Elements 5.0 for my column in the Sunday Tribune. You can read it on my computer blog here. I'm often amazed at just how good Elements is, even in comparison to the full Photoshop package.

Interesting article

Check out the Digital Life page in the UK's Online Telegraph. It has usually got an interesting beginners' article on digital photography, digital questions and answers and crits on a couple of readers' pictures.

Member's pictures

Click any picture to view an enlargement.

Cecil Hodgson sent in some pics from the recent outing to the Butterfly Farm and I have chosen two to put up here.

I'm not knowledgeable about birds so I don't what kind this one is. Nonetheless it is a good picture of the little fellow. The picture is well composed, sharp, and the background in nicely out of focus so it doesn't intrude. The colour is very good even though uploading it to the blog has degraded it a bit; the colours in Cecil's original are more vibrant than they appear here. The only improvement I could suggest would be to clone away the nearly-in-focus stem on the right or, which might be even better, crop it off along with a bit of sky at the top.

This butterfly picture [I hope it is a butterfly and not a moth] has all the strengths of the bird one above, in that it has good colour, the subject is sharp, and it has an unobtrusive background. For me, the failing in the picture is the banana in the foreground, which is overly dominant in the frame and which and draws my eye every time. I think that the picture could be improved by cropping off most of the banana; a square crop would work quite well with this picture.

Food which distracts from the subject, is quite a common problem with wildlife pictures and I've seen it, for example, in insect pictures and in ones taken at vulture restaurants. I'd recommend that, when coming across an animal posing nicely [and that includes humans], you take the shot immediately because you might lose the opportunity if you faff about. Then, if you've got time, you can have a bash at improving the picture by re-framing it or changing your viewpoint.

Click any picture to view an enlargement.

Photo opportunities

Verena sent in this exhaustive list of photo opportunities around KZN in November:

Fish Eagle Coast Mile Swim
11/11/2006
Venue: Richards Bay
Contact: Casper Kriel 0828966011
casper.kriel@mondibp.com

Whale Watching
November 2006
Venue: St Lucia
Contact: 035-5901259
advantage@zululink.co.za

Nature Trails

18 and 19^th November : Canoe Trails on Umgeni River. Phone Ross 031 201 1303

11^th November : Bat watch at Umdloti – Phone Juan 082 830 6334

Walks and Runs

24^th November : Coca Cola Fun Run (Wildlife) – Amphitheatre Chris 083 452 3465

Cricket

22^nd November : SA vs India
30^th November : Dolphins vs Warriors

Canoeing

8, 15, 22, 29^th November : Landrover Dice Series at Shongweni 033 347 5320

Radio Boat Club

Every Saturday at Blue Lagoon : Steve 031 564 9878 or Sheldon 031 262 1506

Horse

11, 12^th November Novice Team Champs – Shongweni
18, 19^th November Shongweni Showing Shows – Shongweni

Motor Racing

12^th November : Senior Motorcross at Springfield
19^th November : Karting at iDube Raceway Phone Gay 031 266 5640

Surfing

25, 26^th November : Rip Curl Gromsearch Finals – Durban

Swimming

12^th November : Masters Grand Prix – Kings Park Pool. 031 312 7272
25^th November : Synchronised swimming KZN Primary Schools – Anne 083 236 7555
26^th November : Capital K 1000m swim – Midmar – 033 3428492

Steam Train

26^th November : Inchanga Choo Choo 082 353 6003

Guided Tours

26^th November – Botanic Gardens. 031 309 1170
26^th November – CROW 031 462 1127
26^th November – Annual Toy Run from Pavilion – Joy 083 285 0815 (Bring toys)

Christmas Parties – Public

29^th November – Uncle Jumbo’s – Richard 083 775 8166

Water Skiing

19^th November : Tournament – The Farm, Camperdown. Linda Quinn 031 207 3377

Every Saturday

10 – 12h00 : Jazz on Wilsons Wharf – phone to take photo’s 031 305 1677

For sale

Melissa is selling a Nikon D200 kit including a Nikon D200 body, Extreme3 Sandisk 1gb card, 70-300mm nikkor telephoto lens, nikkor afs18-70mm ed dx lens, mulitgrip battery pack ,sb 600 speedflash, camera bag, plus 2 nikon batteries. Terms will be cash and she is open to genuine offers.

There is also a studio flash kit available. It includes 2 Hensel Contra studio flash untits, 2 stands, 2 umbrellas, 1 softbox, a remote flash trigger and other accessories for R10,000. There is also a black paper roll backdrop for R600, a very large black fabric backdrop for R200, and a very large white fabric backdrop for R200.

Drop me a line on my usual e-mail if you want to make an offer on any item.

Photoshop Tip # 1

At the club the other night I demonstrated a cunning technique for selectively darkening or lightening areas in a picture. Called painting with light (PWL), it is similar in effect to the dodge and burn technique used in traditional dark rooms.

Photoshop users can download and install an action from ActionCentral which will automate the creation of the two extra layers required for PWL. Click here and, once you arrive at the site, scroll down until you get to Chip Springer’s PWL action. Download it and go here to find out how to install it in Photoshop.

Users of other image manipulation programs can also use the technique but you have to create the layers yourself. The steps are as follows:

• Open the image you want to work on.
• Create an empty layer above the background layer, name it Paint Light, fill it with black and set its layer blend mode to Color Dodge. Your Layer Palette should now look something like this:

• Create another empty layer, name it Paint Shadow, fill it with white and set its layer blend mode to Color Burn. Your Layer Palette should look something like this:

• You can now lighten areas in your picture by painting white onto the Paint Light layer using a large soft brush.
• Conversely, you can darken areas in your picture by painting black onto the Paint Shadow layer using a large soft brush.
• Turn down the opacity of the brush to 5-10% and build up the effect gradually, to get the best results.

Member's pictures

Click on any picture to view an enlargement.

Chantell Joubert sent some pictures in and Harry Lock commented on them.

Of the two cyling pictures you sent in, I prefer the one of the single cyclist. You have gotten in close enough to get the facial expression and good detail in his outfit.

You will see, in the example below, that I have cropped it a little closer. I feel that if the whole of the front wheel had been in the picture it would have been fine, but since the bottom of the wheel is missing, one may as well crop it, as the viewer will still know that he is on a bicycle.

You will notice that I have also cleaned up the background a little - one of the advantages of the digital era. But it is also something of a disadvantage as we expect every picture to be perfect!

The guy on the ski is a good photograph, as you have his face in focus and captured the action well. You pressed the shutter at the right time on his stroke. Again, I have played with the cropping, the vertical pic shows the waves behind him giving the impression of him being chased. This sense of excitement is lost in the horizontal crop.In both instances, I lightened his face.

Click on any picture to view an enlargement.

Reminder - Meeting

** A reminder about the talk on the newly reissued book Barrier of Spears at Hillcrest Library this Friday evening. Full details further down in the blog.

** Remember also the meeting next week on Tuesday, 7 September. We are going to have a short talk about flash from John and a little bit of Photoshop from myself. We'll then have the usual showing of members' pictures.

Joy by Allan Jackson

Library display

The display in Hillcrest Library promoting the club went up today and, although I was disappointed at how few picture submissions were received from members, I think it looks pretty good. The display:

and the poster I did for it:

Member's pictures

Click on a pic to see an enlargement

Here are a couple of pics from Verena:

By Verena Illingworth

A great effort for what is a very hard shot to take; those bikes are moving at an unbelievable speed. There is a lot of action in this picture and the guys are obviously pedalling their hearts out. There is a nice use of differential focus in which the background is blurred, so as not to be too obtrusive, and the leading riders are sharp. In this situation you would want the rider in the front to be the sharpest but the one behind him in the white shirt is slightly sharper. It's not a major problem as far as I'm concerned, however.

I think that the shot could have been better with the bike wheels showing in front and a bit less sky. As it is, it could be improved for my taste if the rider on the extreme right were cropped off along with a bit of sky.

By Verena Illingworth

This is a cute picture of a man and his dog watching something. It happened to be the cyclists in the Amashovashova race but that isn't important, the story here is about the relationship between the man and the dog. The picture works very well for me and I don't feel I need to see more of the man or the dog's face. It is also a good example of a photographer taking pictures at an event but not forgetting to look around to see what other subjects are there to be found.

Click on a pic to see an enlargement

Photo books / news

There are a couple of items of news for you today including the fact that photo books are now obtainable locally. What these are is collections of your pictures printed out on a variety of sizes of paper and neatly bound in hardcover binding. Photo World in Pick 'n Pay Centre in Hillcrest have samples in various sizes to show, and they are quite reasonably priced.

One very cool thing about them is that they don't require any layout skill because it is all done with a computer program which is available from Photo World for R25, I think it was, or which can be downloaded for free here. You just plug your pictures into the templates provided and take the resulting file down to Photo World. You can also have calendars and postcards printed in the same way.

I had a very interesting morning on Saturday when Jack Fisher and I visited SuperMax in Springfield Park. SuperMax is one of Durban's few professional-level photo labs and has branched out into photographic studio equipment, tripods, and the like, and have opened their own studio. One piece of good news is that the price of studio equipment has come right down and you can now get a kit with two flash heads, stands and related equipment for around R6000. An extra couple of umbrellas, a flashmeter and radio transmitter for the flashes takes the total to something over R9000. Backgrounds are extra and how much you will have to spend depends on whether you want canvas, paper, cloth, or vinyl.

We then visited the SuperMax studio in Kensington Centre in Durban North, and got a lot ideas about how to set up a studio. I also got some ideas which were less welcome when I caught sight of the studio camera which is an EOS 5D, which has a sensor the same size as a frame of 35mm film, and the rather special 24-105mm F4 L lens attached to it.

One of the biggest drawbacks to digital photography, especially if you're shooting hundreds of frames, is the time needed to 'develop' the pictures and get them ready for printing. Max Fowles, of SuperMax, was telling me that there is photo lab software on the way in the few months, which will allow him to accept raw camera files and prepare them for printing. This would save professional photographers a lot of time that they can put to better use shooting pictures for other clients.

Member's pictures

Click on a pic to see an enlargement

Here are a couple of pictures from Natalie. The first is from the recent outing to the Butterfly Farm and the second is from the Amashovashova Cycle race the next day.

By Natalie Knibbs

This is a really nice picture of the two little girls. The lighting on them is good and, although there is a fair amount going on the background, it doesn't overpower the subjects. The girls are quite central in the picture but it doesn't bother me.

By Natalie Knibbs

This is a nicely panned shot of this cyclist which gives the pic a good feeling of movement by blurring the background. The slowish shutter speed has also added blur to the spokes of the wheels adding to the feeling of movement and the cyclist has plenty of space to move into, which is good. The picture is a little flat, to my eye, and could have benefitted from a levels addjustment and saturation boost. I would also have cropped the yellow lampost off at the left and tried to clone out the white squarish thingy behind the bike.

________

Natalie's two pictures have been compressed to the point where they are looking less than their best. This can happen when you send pictures by e-mail using the e-mail programs' automatic settings, which are usually designed to make pictures as small as possible. For display on this blog, or other website, you aim for a size of 1000-1600 pixels on the longest edge of the picture, and choose a medium or medium-high quality setting.

The best way of preparing pictures for display on the web is to size them in your usual image manipulation program. You will find that making pictures smaller often results in them losing sharpness and you might find it a good idea to give them a light sharpening before saving them using a medium or medium-high quality setting. When sending them by e-mail, you should specify that they are sent at their original size.

Click on a pic to see an enlargement

PS Album Starter

By Andrew Begg

Photoshop Album Starter Edition is a cousin to the well known Photoshop application. It is mainly meant for use to cataloguing your photographs. As we begin to collect those literally thousands of images, it becomes increasingly important to be able to retrieve a certain picture at a moment’s notice.

You have the ability so sort your pictures by date, or by tagging. Tagging allows you to place each of your pictures in a category. Categories include: People, Places, Events and Other, but you can create your own additional categories as you need them.

With date view, you are able to select a specific day, and watch a slideshow of your pictures shot that day. Once correctly installed, PS Album, will detect when your camera or media card is connected to your PC, and will transfer your images to your hard drive, into a folder named after the date/time of the import (transfer).

PS Album will support JPEG and AVI (for those people who shoot video clips), but not RAW. For RAW, one will need something a bit more advanced. When your images have been transferred, and catalogued, you have the option of performing basic corrections to your image. Under the General Fixes Category, you may fix colour, levels, saturation and contrast. Additionally, red eye removal is possible, as well as image cropping.

The final task is printing, which you can do directly from PS Album. Unfortunately, the variety of printing options is limited as we tend to use A4 size paper in this country, and the majority of the printing options are intended for use with the US standard “letter” size paper.

The great thing about PS Album is its price: it is free to download from the Adobe Web Site, and after registration, the program is yours.

Photo opportunity

Verena sent in this about a beach festival which sounds interesting:

"October 27-30: The South Coast is set to sizzle with the South Coast Surf Carnival. The programme includes a national longboarding contest and kitesurfing on Scottburgh and Kelso beaches, as well as development surfing clinics and the family orientated sport of kite flying. Kiteboarder registration opens at 10am at Kelso on the Friday, with registration for longboarders at 6pm at the same venue. Registration for kite flying opens at 9am at Kelso on Saturday."

Window success

Harry has stirred his stumps and has put up a club picture board at Photo World at the Pick 'n Pay Centre in Hillcrest. Pictures chosen by popular acclamation will be posted there each month.

October outing: reportback

A great time was had by all at the Butterfly Farm last Saturday. Hopefully, in due course, we'll see other pictures taken on the outing. The butterflies were pretty elusive but I did see a lot of shots being taken of Natalie's cute daughters.

You may know that Natalie was expecting and you'll be pleased to know that the new baby has been delivered; a Sony A100 10 Mega-pixel DSLR. It has built-in anti-shake technology which looks as though it works like a bomb to reduce camera shake. Click here for a review of the camera.

The club at breakfast by Jack Fisher

Great flash exposure. Must have been taken with a Nikon !! ;-)

Click the picture to view an enlargement.

Lens reviews

Here's a link to PhotoZone which does good lens reviews. You'll also find the link on the right-hand side of each page on this blog.

Extra Outing

We had a wonderful well-attended outing today to the Butterfly Farm. Hopefully, we'll get some pictures to put up in due course. In the meantime, some of the folk who were there decided to get together again on Sunday, 22 October, to take pictures of the cyclists in the Amashovashova race. We are going to be meeting from 7pm onward at the bottom of Bothas Hill at the corner where Kassier Road leads into Old Main Road. There will be a skottel so bring something to cook for breakfast and, of course, something to drink.

Cyclist by Allan Jackson

Online Photo Albums

In the Sunday Tribune some time ago, I wrote an article on online photo albums which you can use to post your pictures on the Internet so that others can view them. You can read the article by clicking here.

In it I wrote about a new service called Picasa Web Albums which was on test and which was unique because it allows you to upload to your web album directly from the free Picasa photo organiser program on your computer. The albums are now open to all and you get 250Mb of free space to store your pictures online. Click here for more info or to sign up.

A sub-section of the committee - by Harry Lock

Library directions

Thanks to Patrick for the reminder that I didn't include directions to the Hillcrest Library in the monthly mailshot. You turn into Hospital Road. as though going to the Hillcrest Sports Club, but go past the entrance and take your first left into Delamore Road. The library is about 100m down the road on your left, in the small municipal complex.

Barrier of Spears

THE FRIENDS OF HILLCREST LIBRARY

will host an audio-visual presentation
(this will include ”Photography – the Art of Painting with Light”)
of a revised reprint of Reg Pearse’s

BARRIER OF SPEARS

by his son

MALCOLM PEARSE

Superb photography * Magnificent scenery * Exhilarating commentary

Time: 19:00
Date: Friday 3 November 2006
Place: Hillcrest Library Hall
Cost: R30.00 entrance fee
Wine and snacks will be available after the presentation

Signed copies of the book will be on sale at a discounted price.

Tickets available at Hillcrest Library or at the door.
Telephone: 031-761 5830

A car guard will be on duty

Member's picture

Here's a picture of a Blue Headed Lizard from Andrew Begg.

You can click on the picture to view an enlargement and you'll see that it has superb use of differential focus to draw attention the main subject. The back leg and body forms a nice line leading you into the picture. It's an excellent picture. One little nitpicking comment is that I would have liked to see a bit more space behind the animal and a bit less in front; that would have put the head on the intersection of thirds.

Why not leave a comment on the picture by clicking the link below.

News / October 2006 outing

* Hillcrest Library has asked us to put up a display in the library at the beginning of November to publicise the club. You are therefore all asked to contribute a small print, 5x7 or 6x8, to the display. You are welcome to mount the picture on card and put your name on it. Prints should be handed to one of the committee members at the outing to the Butterfly Farm on 21 November or dropped off at Harry Lock's home at 7 Edward Road, Hillcrest, before 29 October. The idea behind the small prints is that there will be room for more pictures, and it won't matter so much if any go missing.

* The outing this month is to the Butterfly Farm in Pietermaritzburg on 21 October. You can either meet us in the car park of the Hillcrest Sports Club at 08h30 to do the usual car sharing thing or meet us at the farm at 09h30. We'll do our photographic thing and have a meal afterwards. The cost will be R22 per person (R8 extra for the monkey house) and the meal will be extra. You can get to the farm by following the N3 around to the right of Pietermaritzburg, taking the Orthmann Road turnoff and going right over the freeway into the industrial area. The farm is well signposted.

* The next meeting is on 7^th November and we'' keep you posted about that once we know what's happening.

Getting exposure right

Here's a nice article on exposure. Click here to read it.

Member's picture

Here's a nice pic of the London Eye by Pat Kernick.

I like it and can only imagine that the print would be a stunner. I think that the inclusion of the ferry in the foreground balances the main subject nicely. Would a little more of the ferry have helped? I don't know; the pic is nice as it is.

Why don't you make a comment on the pic? You can do that by clicking the Comments link just below this.

September outing: reportback

We were relatively few on the trip to Alveston but a lot of fun was had by all. Click on the picture to view an enlargement.

By Allan Jackson

How's this for a lens?

DP Review has a story on a lens produced by Carl Zeiss which is world's largest. The Zeiss Apo Sonnar T* F4.0 lens has a focal length of 1700mm and rumour has it that it was ordered by a wildlife photography fanatic who had some oil wells in his backyard. Click here to read the story.

Photo composition

Check out this article in the Telegraph on photo composition. Click here to read.

SA's top Bluesman

Here are a couple of pictures of South African blues guitarist, Dan Patlansky. I took these at the University's Centre for Jazz, when he performed there some time ago.

What you need for great photography

There is a story about a young student who was apprenticed to a master artist to learn to paint, but he felt he could not paint properly as his brushes were cheap and of an inferior quality to those of the master. After a while he plucked up enough courage to ask the teacher if he could borrow his brushes. To his great joy the old man agreed, and with the bundle of brushes in his hand he set off to his studio. When he got there he boasted to a fellow student: “I have borrowed the master’s brushes so now I will be able to paint like him.”

His friend looked at him and said, “It is not the master’s brushes you need, but his soul.”

How many times do we think to ourselves: “If only I had the same lens as old so-and-so, I would be as good as he is.” There is no doubt that there is some equipment that is better than the rest but will it necessarily make us better photographers? I don’t think so. Even the best Leica equipment in the hands of a photographer with no imagination will only result in technically superior boring photographs.

As I see it, there are three aspects to making photographs. Firstly, choosing the equipment; secondly, the taking of the photograph; and lastly the processing and printing of the picture. With the advent of digital photography there is much discussion about the choice of equipment and the methods of processing the images in the computer, and it sometimes seems that the picture taking process has become secondary.

How many times have you heard a digital user saying, “Don’t worry, I’ll fix it on the computer.” I am not suggesting that this is always a bad thing but in many ways, digital technology has made us lazy photographers. Meanwhile it should be making us better at making images. Never before has it been this easy to apply Ansel Adams’ concept of pre-visualisation. Instead of shooting madly, and spending hours trolling through hundreds of thumbnails trying to salvage something – think before you shoot.

This brings us to the most important part of the picture making process – the taking of the photograph. We are in the fortunate position of having equipment that can focus for us and seldom gets the exposure wrong. This frees us up to concentrate on composition, but unfortunately many don’t take advantage of this. We are just seeing more perfectly sharp, well exposed, but still badly composed pictures. Perhaps we should forget about the technology for a while and try to capture something of the soul of the old masters. In his day, Cartier-Bresson was not a great photographer because he used a Leica, but because he and an ability to observe people and anticipate the moment at which to press the shutter.

A celebrity chef was at an exhibition of a photographer’s work. He said to the photographer, “Your pictures are wonderful, you must have a very good camera.” On another occasion the same photographer was at a dinner catered for by the chef in question. After the meal he complimented the chef, ”The food was wonderful, you must have a very good stove.”

Meeting: October 2006

The October meeting will take place on 3 October 2006 at Hillcrest Sports Club. The meeting will be at 7pm as usual but we will meeting there at 6pm for a meal. The meals have so far been pretty good and, at R30 per skull, great value. Just drop me an e-mail to book if you would like to come for the meal.

Harry and Kevin are going to kick off the meeting by showing us how to photograph using domestic lighting. You're welcome to bring your cameras along as you'll get a chance to try out the techniques out for yourself. We'll then have a break for coffee and finish up with a showing of members' pictures; everyone is asked to bring two prints along for the purpose.

The Blues Broers by Harry Lock.

Outing: September 2006

Our outing this month is to the nature reserve at the top of Alveston on Saturday, 30 September at 7am. Take the Alveston turn-off from Kassier Road (the same one as for the Farmer's Market and Waldorf School) and the the gate is on the left, just a few yards after the little church. You can meet us there at 7am or in the car park of the Hillcrest Sports Club at 06h45 and drive up with us. The cost will be R10 per person at the reserve.

I am told that there is a toilet there but I'd suggest you bring a flask of coffee or something to drink. There is a waterfall and some walks to take; some are apparently pretty strenuous but there is one along the flat for those who are not so inclined. We thought we'd go on to breakfast at Rebel Rock in Peaceval at 9:30 or 10am. You need not book for the outing.

Welcome

Your duly elected committee is going to be using this blog to post details of our club meetings and outing. So far we've communicated solely by e-mail but our messages don't always get through so we thought we'd create this place on the web so members can check to see what's coming up the future.

We also intend to feature members' pictures and you are invited to send in some of your pictures to Allan Jackson. You can get his email address from the e-mail updates he sends out or from him in person at the club. He will post the pictures received and you are invited to leave your comments on them, or on anything else, by clicking the link at the bottom of each post. Comments left will not appear immediately but only after being checked for evil things such as advertising and obscenity.

Here's a picture from Allan to kick off the process:

Flying Tigers by Allan Jackson

And here's a link to an article by Ken Rockwell who is very passionate that equipment is not what matters about photography. He tells the story of the great photographer Edward Steichen who photographed Isadora Duncan at the Acropolis with a camera borrowed from the head waiter of the hotel he was staying at. Click here to read the article.