Minutes for September meeting

[anna mccolm]

Pierre opened the meeting by welcoming our newest member, Merv Anderson.

Since the summer some people are not getting Club emails and Doug suggested looking in our spam boxes and, if they are there, adding them to favorites so that they are re-classified. Wendy will chat with Ning about this problem.

Doug show at the library continues until Sept. 29th.

Evelyn Smith's photos are showing all month at Country Grocer.

No report yet on the website as Jean is travelling. Wendy, Ross, Pat and Doug are also on this committee looking for guidelines for the website.

Pierre reported on Photosynthesis. There was a record number of sales this year which bodes well for next year's Photofest - June 13th - 27th 2019. Photofest will have its own website with maps of the various galleries and venues that are involved and there will be a crosslink to the Photoclub's website.

The guest speaker David Ellingsen was introduced and welcomed.

David grew up on Cortes Island, moved to Victoria at the age of 15 and stayed for the next 15 years. Then Vancouver, back to Cortes for 4 years and is now living in Victoria.

He took a diploma programme in Vancouver in commercial photography in 2000 and immersed himself in every aspect of that life, from wedding shoots to editorial work, athletic events and high end advertising. He did well and was starting to make some serious money and then realised this was not what he wanted to do and so quit. He then started a career of more artistic, creative, personal projects making visual statements about the state of the environment.

He has created many series and he shared them with the group. You can see some of his work in Gallery 8.

He told us about places he has used to further his career and get his art noticed. Canada is not the best place for achieving this! One place is 'Lens Culture' a photography network started in Amsterdam. You can find a wide range of photography on this site and there are competitions that are juried by International people involved in Art, such as museum curators. His series 'The Last Stand' was a finalist in one of these competitions and was noticed by National Geographic who wanted to publish it on their website. This then led to a museum show in the Nederlands then one on South Korea and next year it will be shown in the Campbell River museum along with the old logging tools he included in his photographs of old growth tree stumps.

Another helpful place is 'Photolucida' a 4 day festival that takes place in Portland every year in April. It costs $900 (US) to enter but you are guaranteed 18 face to face meetings with interested buyers. People in the publishing and editorial field come from all over the world looking for photography to enhance their various projects. Photolucida is a big event with much of the city getting involved; The opening ceremonies are in a stadium that seats 60,000 people and there are musical events attached to the festival,  award ceremonies etc.

The biennial (on even years) Fotofest in Houston is even bigger and costs about the same to enter. David did well here too with results of shows in Argentina, Lithuania and Mexico City.

An ongoing project that David is doing is called Milestones and is a visual record to show incremental changes that may ultimately effect us all. He shoots the same thing every morning at the same time. He lives by the ocean and so shoots the ocean with the Olympic Mountains in the background. He puts these photos into one large image showing a year's worth of this same scene - lots of tiny images with subtle changes in colour and mood stacked together like bricks. You can see the smoky weeks in summer, for example.

Next month's challenge is to shoot the same scene (from the same place) for 7 consecutive days.

[Avril Kirby]

Fabulous minutes, Anna--more info here than was presented at the meeting. Thank you!

[timothy gibbon]

yes, thanks. keeps me a little less out of it. (same thing 7 consecutive days? that's not how the almighty did it!)