October meeting minutes

[Avril Kirby]

Minutes of Oct. 12th Meeting

In Wendy's absence the meeting was ably chaired by Bob Rogers. He welcomed new members Mindy Heppner (does she sing, I wonder?) and Kahsia Hartwell.

Ongoing and upcoming shows and exhibitions: (Sorry, I'm just a little late for some of these)

Margaret Benmore's street art at Fernwood cafe, on until Oct. 16, a vibrant show.

Jana Zachariou will be putting up her work at Fernwood on Oct. 16th., a must-see.

Ross McLeod's exhibition of canvas framing at Artspring Celebration of the Arts, Oct. 14 and 15 (I heard he did an excellent job of presenting the whole process)

Surfacing: at Artspring from Oct. 28 to Nov. 7, an exploration of art in two dimensions. Doug McMillin (and possibly others from the club?) will have some interesting pieces in this show. Opening night is the evening of Friday, Oct. 28th.

Education Committee future plans:

A talk on night photography and field trip later, by Bob Rogers in January '17.

Long range photography by Colton Prevost in February.

Flower photography by Jana Zachariou in March.

Simon Henson will be announcing meetings soon for those who have signed up for special interest groups, macro and black and white.

Judy McPhee will soon be asking for submissions for the winter slide shows presented at the hospital and around town.

Wendy thanks the members who submitted pumpkinish banners for the website in her hour of need.

Our Speaker

Bob welcomed Janet Dwyer, our speaker for the evening. Janet is an internationally respected and prize-winning scanographer, who has developed her personal form of photographic art using a flatbed scanner and objects from nature to create new realities, relationships and surreal combinations. She has had an extensive education in photography and has taught at many different institutions. She is also known as an excellent photographer of works of art, and has done so for Robert Bateman and the Royal B.C. Museum, among others. And her work has been in magazines and books from National Geographic to Macleans.

After the introduction Janet then took us for a look into her world. It was fascinating. She uses an ordinary 8 1/2 x 11 inch scanner, sometimes hung upside down, and a 44 inch printer to produce her works of art. The scanner's resolution is so much higher than that of a digital camera that she is able to blow her photographs up as large as she likes or her printer allows. She arranges natural objects on the bed of the scanner, scans them at low resolution until happy with her arrangement and then scans them at full resolution, a process which takes some time. She uses flowers, bones, nests, donated dead birds, living spiders, silk worms and anything else that calls to her to create her wonderful pieces. Deconstruction and decay often figure in her art. And lately flower bits and bugs, even fossilized fish, frozen in ice have, too.

Janet uses a black cotton velvet for some of her backgrounds, since she has taken the cover off her scanner to allow for depth in her work. She does a lot of dodging and burning afterwards to make up for overblown highlights. The files are huge, often 750 mb to 1 gigabyte. She cold mounts her photos on metal usually and uses 5 protective coats afterwards. She doesn't work with standard sizes but allows the pieces to dictate what size they should be.

The slides she showed us of her work were mind-blowing--beautiful and different and absorbing in their detail. Many thanks to you, Janet, for your wonderful talk.

We are invited to Janet's studio on Saturday Oct. 22nd, around noon. Her address is 234 Fairway Crescent, above St. Mary Lake.

The Slide Show

This month's challenge was black and white photography and the slide show was excellent. I could talk about it but it's better if you look at it on Doug McMillin's October slide show blog post. Well done, everyone.

Next Month's Challenge: Scanned images. If someone needs a scanner, Doug M. has one on offer, to lend or to give. Contact him at [e-mail]. Vuescan will run drivers for any scanner on your computer.

(Any additions, subtractions or errors, please post below) Avril Kirby

[Wendy Rosier]

Thanks for the awesome minutes Margaret!  It is almost like being there   :-)

[Avril Kirby]

(Not Margaret!)

[timothy gibbon]

thanks Avril.

[timothy gibbon]

ps. I have a photo in Surfacing too.

[Avril Kirby]

Good for you, Timmy!

[Curt Firestone]

Wonderful to keep up with the club while traveling

Thank you

[Margaret C. Benmore]

Thanks Avril for covering for me... you did a great job... almost like being there...