Minutes for August Meeting

[anna mccolm]

A group of 14 Photoclub members met on August 8th and arranged the chairs in a more informal semicircle.

There are no new members. Doug was thanked for 9 years of tireless service creating and showing the monthly slideshows at the meetings. In those 9 years he missed just one meeting, for which he apologised! He is passing the torch to Derek Wilkinson who had his debut slideshow after the break.

There was some talk about how to handle getting the key from the Lions Club to open the room. They are reluctant to give us a copy of the key as this would set a precedent for too many other users of the facility. Avril will look into various possibilities and report back. She also suggested giving the Lions Club post-dated cheques for the room rental.

Shows: Judy has sent out an invitation to Club members to replace her photos at Embe Bakery but received no response. She needed her frames for other shows so has temporarily replaced them with some of her canvas prints from the Electric vehicle show. If anyone would like to use that space to show their photos please get in touch with Judy - [e-mail]

She is showing images at Salt Spring Apple Company, on the Fulford Ganges road - currently a B&B, a tasting room and a place to buy apples and apple trees. Next Spring they will be selling their cider.

Evelyn Smith will be showing photos at Country Grocer in September.

Doug will be showing his photos at the Library with a low key (no champagne) reception on August 31st from 4pm - 6pm.

Photosynthesis is opening its show at Artspring on August 22nd with a reception from 5pm - 7.30pm. Several members of the Club are involved in this and next year we will be combining the Photoclub's Eclectic Visions show with parallel show times from Photosynthesis.

Pierre asked Jean to report back options for our website at next month's meeting, in September; There needs to be closure and decisions made. Currently the website is in limbo, as it's not clear which direction it is going in. It is not very functional right now - people are not posting much and those people are not commenting on other people's work. Doug and Avril have withdrawn from daily comments (Thank You both for so much effort and caring).

Pierre asked Pat if there was enough money in the coffers to cover costs for speakers who need to stay overnight because of the evening ferry schedule. There is. He wondered how much we could put aside for each visiting speaker (covering costs of an evening meal, ferry travel and overnight accommodation) $100? $150? Who decides this? Is it an executive decision?

Avril asked if anyone can billet our September speaker - David Ellingsen, who is coming to talk to us from Victoria. The September meeting will be on the THIRD Wednesday, on September 19th. David shows works at Gallery 8 and has been in the National Geographic magazine. He also takes photos of skulls and has an interesting selfie project on the go.

The Club doesn't have an education co-ordinator at the moment so Pierre is asking Club members to please get in touch with him if they have any ideas about people who might share their photographic knowledge with us.

Uri Colgan talked to the group about Panoramic Images and started by taking 3 quick photos of the group and then showing us the stitching process in Photoshop on the big screen.

He showed us a panoramic image taken from Mt. Bruce from Schwartz Bay over to Galiano. Hundreds of high resolution photos went into this single wide image, all seamlessly stitched together. One can zoom into any part of this photo and see clear detail. He later showed us an image of London  - just a mass of grey buildings - and then zoomed into one tiny spot where one could clearly see two people on a street corner and read all the writing on shop windows and road signs. A bit creepy.

Uri showed us a 360 degree image taken in his garden, using 4 shots. Uri was in 3 of them! The camera needs to be on a tripod. It needs to be on a manual setting, not autofocus, and shot in RAW if possible (for capturing the most detail) or TIFF. All shots have to be taken from a single viewpoint; the 'eye' of the camera needs to be kept in a constant position and you want to rotate the camera around this point. Finding the optical centre (also known as the no parallex point) is essential in any image that has diverging lines, such as roads, fencelines, windows etc. - the close-up and distant points have to line up. In order to set your camera to find the no parallex point google 'How to find the No- Parallex Point' or ask Uri.

Getting back to the 4 images of Uri's garden - he dragged them into P.T.Gui which finds control points to align and stitches it into a seamless 360 degree image and saves it in a folder. In that folder you can view this image umpteen ways - as a normal panoramic image, or as fish-eye or architectural or little planet or Pagnini or stereographic and many other ways. Lots of fun.

Next months challenge for the Club is to take a panoramic image. Many I-phones have this software as do most current cameras. There is also a software program called Hugin that you can download for free. For other options - google 'open source (free) panorama software'.

After a break Derek showed the 'Rock" slideshow to the group. There was a Rock musical presentation, courtesy of Wendy, as well as images of sandstone and other rock formations.

[Curt Firestone]

I could not make the meeting.  Appreciate the minutes.  Thank you.

[Avril Kirby]

Thanks, Anna, well done, very detailed!