April 2012 Club Meeting...

Folks,

Our April club meeting was held yesterday afternoon at Rumores bar.

The main content this month was the introduction of a suite of video tutorials which I found, which covers all aspects of photography in a clear and interesting way, presented by a professional photographer Mike Browne. For this meeting I wanted to try the videos through our club setup (laptop & projector) to see how clear the videos were in the space, both visually and audibly. Thankfully it all appeared to go well with clear enough sound through smallish speakers.

To start the ball rolling we watched the first videos covering Shutter, Aperture, ISO, Shutter Priority Mode, Aperture Priority Mode, and finally Understanding Histograms. As it's always quite difficult to get enough content for club meetings, I intend to use more of these tutorials, which follow on explaining Composition, Lenses, Depth of Field, Getting Sharp Images, Lighting & Flash, and many more tips & Techniques.

After the tutorials, we followed on with a session on tweaking our images using the Histogram & Auto Levels tool in Paint Shop Pro. I will hopefully write up an article on Histogram use some time this week, and post it in the Tips & Techniques section of the forum. For those of you using different graphics apps, the techniques are transferrable.

As a follow on to that, we decided to make our monthly assignment a post of images Before and After histogram adjustment. So if you can post two images... one as the original untweaked image, and the other after histogram adjustment... and also jot down the new histogram values. Before adjustment the 3 values will always be 0, 128, 255. Please add to your post the 3 new 'adjusted by you' values.

It was decided that our next Field Trip would be to Garrucha Harbour to explore the harbour and beachfront areas. The agreed date was April Wednesday 18th for 11am. I will post nearer the time for an exact meeting point. Those who wish to meet up here prior to heading for the coast should meet at the Overa hotel off the E15 for 10:15am.

Look forward to our next field trip, and keep those posts & comments coming in... see you soon!

Also, if you know of any friends or neighbours who might be interested in coming along... let them know what we're doing, and ask them along to either a field trip or club meeting... failing that we're going to have to drag people off the streets!!!

Rgds,
Howard