October 2011 Club Meeting...

Folks,

Our second club meeting was held today at Rumores bar, and nice to see a few new members turning up. Still quite an unstructured affair, but we did manage to discuss photo file formats and file organisation. Also, as some new members fell into the category of newbie point & shoot users, we discussed best file format for highest resolution from your camera, with a view to further discuss the process from taking a shot to downloading to your computer, then making minor/further changes and tweaks before saving files for post/emailing/printing etc. Sounds simple, but a huge topic! Particularly to a newbie who may not fully understand all the stages and options available. Hopefully over the coming months though we'll cover all these points so that all members are confident in the basics.

We did cover some of the differences between shooting raw, tif & jpg file formats to illustrate the differences in quality and file size each file format produces, and why we might use them. Again, this is a subject we will no doubt return to in the future as it's a central part of digital photography. We touched on RAW format, which is a huge topic in itself, and one that will probably be put on the back burner for a while, but will get a mention from time to time for the more adventurous of our members. In the meantime I did reply to a post today and added a comment about raw, and required tweaks... https://almanzoraphotoclub.forumotion.com/t50-testing-raw-images#81

It was also decided that our next Field Trip would be to Saliente Monastry. This will be on Thursday 13th October, meeting first at Saliente village at 11am. Ken will be posting directions to those who don't know the area.

This month's Photo Assignment will be... Red. So members are requested to get out and about with their cameras and get some shots of anything that falls into this category... from flowerpots to ships! Please upload your photos into the Darkroom Gallery section of the forum for display and discussion. Any new members who have not posted images to the forum should first read the 'sticky' on inserting images, and if encounter any problems please post to the Photo Cafe where one of the other members will hopefully talk you through the process, and help you on the way.

We thank the Rumores/Albox computer club for leaving their overhead projector for our club's use, and I'm sure it will be a real benefit to the club as we spend more time at future meetings either discussing each other's images or during various topic tutorials.

I hope everyone bears with us as we bumble through these early sessions and hopefully get more organised as a club through trial and error. We'll try to get agendas organised with the help of all members, and try to cover topics which will benefit users of all levels of experience. We'll try not to get too bogged down with computing technicalities, and try to concentrate on more general photographic aspects, but as there is a fair level of computing interaction with digital photography there will be a bit of crossover... sorry.

For the time being, it was decided to hold our monthly meetings at Rumores bar on the 1st Friday of each month at 4pm. Field trip locations and dates will be agreed at the preceeding club meeting.

Look forward to our next field trip and monthly assigment pics coming in... see you soon!

Rgds,
Howard