A first class evening for our workshop 'Beyond the Thirds'. The attendance was probably the best for quite some time.
Alan Sarsby was in sparkling form, interacting extremely well with members.
After a short section on mathematics, which though vital to the ‘rule of thirds’ went right over my (and I suspect others’) heads, Alan went on to outline other techniques that made an image stand out from the rest, using his photographs to get responses from his audience.
After the tea break, packs of 6 or 7 images were passed round the five tables with the brief that each team had to examine each pack of images & record what made each image ‘different’.
At the end, all the comments were handed in &, it seems, there are around 60+ more reasons than the ‘rule of thirds’ that make an image stand out. Alan said he would summarise all the results & send them back to us. I’ll include these on the website when I get them.
All in all, an excellent evening with a lot of fun, plenty of interaction among members and, I’m positive, a lot of us learnt quite a lot.
Again, an excellent turn out and we were fortunate to have Nigel Rae, from Felixstowe, as the judge for our first open competition.
There were less than the usual number of prints in the three different categories, but they were of the usual high standard. This was the opinion of Nigel who gave a lot of very constructive & useful advice with his judgments. While the print images were very varied and of an extremely high quality, the PDIs weren’t quite of the same high standard.
As the judging had finished early, there was quite a long & involved discussion on producing PDIs. It was very informative & I, for one, will certainly be putting what he said into practice.
In essence he said that
1 PDIs should be photographed in RAW together with any manipulation
2 They should be stored in TIF format (although that may take a lot of space)
3 They should only go to JPEG for display (& at no other time)
4 They should be displayed at 1400 x 1050 pixels and 72 dpi regardless of the
projector’s resolution as that is what EAF & a lot of clubs require.
Our new projector & laptop are currently being tried out so that we can get to grips with a new operating system & should be operational for our next meeting.