Page 1 FJKF September, 2005 Issue 1 HILLS CAMERA CLUB AT CASTLE HILL RSL Special Interest Articles: • New Committee Members • Robert’s Ramblings • Brian Coleman Member Profile Individual Highlights: Club News 2 Outings 3 Of Bits & Bytes 4 Your Story 7 M-Profile 8 Point Scores 9 Other news 10 President’s Report 10 – 9 – 8…… It is with pleasure that I launch The Hills Camera Club Newsletter. This monthly newsletter has been established to further enhance the communication with you, the membership. This will help to keep us informed about current issues, programming, upcoming events, articles of interest, a for sale section and snippets, if you have any suggestions send them through to our editor Irena Hayes. Our club is expanding, not only in membership, but in knowledge which members are happy to share with each other. I have been very impressed with the standard of photography that is being produced. New members are encouraged to enter, those who have no previous experience should not hesitate to ask other members for information or assistance. Put an image into a competition. Even if you feel a little intimidated you will be surprised how quickly you learn once you join in. Our new rules, commencing in the New Year, should help to resolve any problems we have with the current arrangements. Welcome to our first Newsletter The Nature Outing to Berowra Valley Regional Park last Sunday was great with flowers out and a particularly nice banksias. Being fairly close to my house it was easy to have the BBQ with people, both members and their partners sharing stories and interests. The food was fabulous with everyone contributing. There is always something new to learn on the outings and I would recommend them to everyone. Don’t forget the next outing to Canberra. Those perfect tulips are sitting there waiting for us. Hope to see lots of you there. See the outings calendar for contact details. The photo below was taken during my recent sojourn overseas on the steps of one of the busiest squares in San Francisco. Margaret Fagg, President This person was making sure that his bike stayed with him while he closed his eyes for just a moment in San Francisco.
Transcript
Page 1
FJKF
September, 2005
Issue 1
HILLS CAMERA CLUB AT CASTLE HILL RSL
Special Interest
Articles:
• New
Committee
Members
• Robert’s
Ramblings
• Brian Coleman
Member Profile
Individual Highlights:
Club News 2
Outings 3
Of Bits & Bytes 4
Your Story 7
M-Profile 8
Point Scores 9
Other news 10
President’s Report
10 – 9 – 8…… It is with pleasure that I
launch The Hills Camera Club Newsletter.
This monthly newsletter has been
established to further enhance the
communication with you, the membership.
This will help to keep us informed about
current issues, programming, upcoming
events, articles of interest, a for sale
section and snippets, if you have any
suggestions send them through to our
editor Irena Hayes.
Our club is expanding, not only in
membership, but in knowledge which
members are happy to share with each
other. I have been very impressed with the
standard of photography that is being
produced. New members are encouraged
to enter, those who have no previous
experience should not hesitate to ask other
members for information or assistance.
Put an image into a competition. Even if
you feel a little intimidated you will be
surprised how quickly you learn once you
join in.
Our new rules, commencing in the New
Year, should help to resolve any problems
we have with the current arrangements.
Welcome to our first Newsletter
The Nature Outing to Berowra Valley
Regional Park last Sunday was great with
flowers out and a particularly nice banksias.
Being fairly close to my house it was easy to
have the BBQ with people, both members
and their partners sharing stories and
interests. The food was fabulous with
everyone contributing. There is always
something new to learn on the outings and I
would recommend them to everyone.
Don’t forget the next outing to Canberra. Those perfect tulips are sitting there waiting for us. Hope to see lots of you there. See the outings calendar for contact details. The photo below was taken during my recent sojourn overseas on the steps of one of the busiest squares in San Francisco.
Margaret Fagg, President
This person was making sure that his bike stayed with him while he closed his eyes for just a moment in San Francisco.
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“Kids having fun”
Next Meeting 13th September: Landscapes Lecture with Ivan Finlay. Listen and learn how to bring your landscapes to life. 27th September: On Four Legs (Set). The four legs must belong to any one subject, living or non-living like a chair, dog, cat etc., or enter the Open.
Club News
Christmas Dinner and Awards Night Once again we are having our Christmas dinner
at the Castle Hill RSL Club, together with our
Print & Slide of the Year. The date is 6th
December. The Judge on the night will be Tony
Egan.
Last year we had a fantastic time. More details
in the coming months.
Just to remind us, the Print of the Year winners
for 2004, were:
Mini Margaret Fagg
Colour Prints Margaret Fagg
Monochrome Jo Ann Windsor
Slide Jono Ferns
New Committee Members
President …………………….. Margaret Fagg
Vice President ………………. Bob Palmer
Treasurer ……………………. Bob Flegg
Assistant Treasurer ……….. Ron Quester
Secretary …………………….. Malcolm Hobson
Program Coordinator ……….. Alia Naughton
Assist. Program Coordinator …Elizabeth Goff
Competition Coordinator ……. Bob Cook
Assist to Comp. Coordinator … Rob Brear, Maria Brear, & Chris Cook
Publicity Officer ………………. James Watkins
Web Master ……………………. Robert Hoehne
Library Coordinator ………….. Robert Hoehne
New Visitors Officer …………. Mary Spence
Public Officer ………………….. Margaret Fagg
Meetings Facilitator ………….. Simon Finch
Meetings Facilitator assistant ….Barry Clinch
Newsletter ………………………Irena Hayes
Welcome to the Newer Members
Pat Kable
Debbie Kable
Barry Clinch
Stephen Wiessner
Warwick Shaw
Malcolm Hobson
Sven Bjornsson
Tony Kent
John Gabriel
Peter Hart
Thor Lund
Mary Spence
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OUTINGS CALENDAR
Competitions
FCC INTERCLUB 2005 Venue: Hosted by Canterbury Bankstown Leagues Club Camera Club, SUNDAY 30th OCTOBER.
Time: 9.30am. (Please get your photos ready).
Sixth annual National Creative Competition: Entry form available from www.northsidecreativephotography.org.au Entries
close Friday 11th November, 2005.The only rule is that the main elements in the work must be images captured by the
author and must be prints (slides & digital files cannot be accepted). Cash prizes to be won. Judge is Len Brown.
Exhibitions
The Wildlife of Reg Grundy at NSW Art Gallery, 16th August to 10
th September 2005.
Our Community – Great Place to Be at National Museum of Australia (Canberra) 30th June to January 2006.
COMPETITIONS AND EXHIBITIONS
17th and 18
th September: Weekend in Canberra (for more info ring Alia on 9899 1408 or
11th October: Night Outing, Meet at the tennis court end of the C2K car park at the
Castle Hill RSL at 7.30pm. Set subject for the photos will be announced then. (The
photographs from this outing will be judged at the Nov 8 meeting).
If anyone has any suggestions for next years Outings, please see Alia Naughton or e-
mail to the above address ASAP.
Flower Photography Tips
1. Use a polariser, this will eliminate shine on petals.
2. Use a reflector if necessary for the overall light balance.
3. Wide open apertures, to throw backgrounds into a blur,
this will help to eliminate distracting elements in the
background (small f number eg. f2.8).
4. Manual focusing because if you have a range of flower
heads in your shot the auto-focus will get confused by
multiple subjects.
5. Think about composition and try isolating one flower (or
two) from the rest.
6. Early morning light rather than in the middle of the day,
the light is softer. After midday the bright light can be very
harsh, resulting in overexposed and pale shots.
7. Try using soft focus or diffusion filter, it will provide a soft
and dreamy effect to the photograph.
8. Use your Macro lens for close up shots and use a tripod.
9. Try some Double Exposure shots for effect.
10. Good luck and have fun.
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Of Bits and Bytes There are many digital photographers out there that do not understand or even know that their world as seen by their cameras is measured in distinct levels of brightness. Knowing this does not make you a better photographer but it may help the quality of your images when they are finally put on paper. Each pixel on a sensor is subject to an amount of light when the shutter is triggered depending upon the scene and the chosen exposure settings. The amount of light is converted into an analogue voltage by the sensor. The analogue voltage then must be converted into a number so that it can be used in a mathematical algorithm to work out colour and brightness and then packed up and shipped off to a memory card. The conversion of the analogue voltage to a number is taken care of by an Analogue to Digital converter, from herein referred to as an A/D. The range of numbers available for the camera to work with is determined by the A/D converter in your camera. Many digital cameras have a 12 bit A/D converter, some 14 bit and very few 16 bit. A 12 bit A/D will resolve 4096 brightness levels (2^12), a 14 bit will do 16384 levels (2^14) and the 16 bit will do an amazing 65536 brightness levels (2^16). JPG is 8 bit or 256 levels ranging from 0 to 255. Why this is important will hopefully become evident as I ramble on. Since most members of the club shoot digital most of you would have at least a modicum of understanding of a histogram, for those that do not a histogram is a graph that shows where all of the brightness levels fall from the darkest to the brightest, the vertical axis shows how many pixels fall in each brightness 'bucket'.
Figure 1. From the camera
Figure 2. Resulting Histogram showing an image that is a bit flat.
This can be taken even further and the brightness level of each colour can be display on an overlapping histogram, this feature is available in Photoshop and more expensive digital cameras. To me this is one of the major contributions of digital cameras, the histogram is the best light meter available. I have yet to hear of anyone that shoots digital in a club environment that does not apply at least a modest degree of adjustment in levels and curves. When a level or curve change is made you are moving the values, or buckets of light around. You will see on the above histogram that the right hand side and left hand side of the graph is empty meaning that no pixel received light levels in either region, that is, there is no true black and true white. For the sake of this explanation we will say that the lowest value is 20 and the highest is 211 of this 8 bit JPG image. If we want to adjust the levels so that there is indeed a true black and white then we are actually spreading the values out so that the value that used to be 20 will now be 0 (black) and the value that was 211 is now 255 (white). What we have now is a histogram with holes in it because we took all of the light values in these areas and moved them either left or right.
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Figure 3. Adjusting levels
Figure 4. The resulting image.
Figure 5. The new histogram showing gaps in tonal range.
This image will no longer have smooth transitions of tones and will lead to Posterization that will be more evident in areas of smooth transition of tones.
Figure 6. Smooth image versus posterized image.
Similar things will happen when doing curves adjustments, the curve below will lead to bunching up of light values at the top and bottom ends of the brightness scale and leave larger holes in the middle of the brightness range.
Figure 7. A slight curve adjustment.
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Figure 8. Resulting image.
Figure 9. Resulting histogram showing further Posterization.
Please note that I used an 8 bit image for my example of what happens when doing levels and curves, figure 6 represents what happens to smooth transitions in tone such as those in skys for landscapes. If we were to use an image that was 12 bit instead what will happen? Since we are now using an image with 4096 levels of brightness rather than only 256 levels the gaps would be very small and probably undetectable in the histogram function of Photoshop and to the eye when finally printed.
To be able to use the full range of values available from your A/D you will have to use your cameras RAW or Tiff function, not JPG. You paid for all those bits, you may as well use them. For any photos you have shot in jpg (8 bit) mode it may be a good idea to convert to a 16 bit mode for editing and then back to 8 bit after, this may reduce the amount of missing gaps in any tonal ranges.
By Robert Hoehne
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July 16th & 17
th I went to the Blue
Mountains Photographic Workshop
which is located at Medlow Bath. I
did the Face Value: An
Introduction to Portraiture. The
W/shop is run by Paul Burrows
(Editor of Camera magazine),
Graham McCarter and Peter Adams
(Photographers) who are all
professional photographers. There
were eight of us in total and on the
first day we did some studio
photography using just one soft box
and a reflector. We were shown
different ways of lighting the face
with different coloured reflectors.
We took turns of taking photos of
each other, and were encouraged to
set our own scene (like different
poses etc.) with their help and
guidance. There was one shot I got
SHARE YOUR STORY
(Books in my collection, just e-mail me if you would like to borrow any.)
Title: Author:
Lighting for Photographers Roger Hicks and Frances Schultz
The Photographer’s Guide to the Studio Roger Hicks and Frances Schultz
50 Portrait Lighting Techniques John Hart
Part –Time Glamour Photography Joe Farace
How to Photograph Children Lisa Jane & Rick Staudt
Portraits Terry Hope
Close up Photography Jonathan Hilton
Posing & Lighting Techniques J.J. Allen
Great Photographs John Freeman
“This page is for anyone
who wants to share their
photographic knowledge or
write about their holiday
adventure”.
This photo was taken at the W/shop on day one in the Studio. This is
Peter and he was attending the W/shop. The only light we used in this
photo was one soft box to Peters left. The backdrop was grey but we put
a piece of material on a stand, (flag) behind the soft box to shade the
backdrop, otherwise the backdrop would be over- lit by spill. Can you see
the catch light in both eyes? We also used a light meter for the reading.
Details: Canon EOS 500N 28-80mm lens (film camera) ISO 200
From memory the reading was: 1/30s @ f5.6
Note: This pose isn’t very flattering for women as it shows a lot of fine
lines on the face. I would suggest a reflector to the left and a diffuser on
the lens for a more softer look.
on my knees to take and was pulled up
saying you don’t want to shoot up his
nose. They said that after I already
took it. As I look at my photo, I can now
see exactly what they meant. This shot
below was one of the better ones.
On the second day we went out on two
different locations in Katoomba. There
we used a big white shade cloth to
shade from direct sunlight. We also
used big gold reflectors. The owner of
the property was our model for the day
on the proviso we send him some
photos.
The whole experience for me was
great as I felt that I needed more
confidence in my portrait photography.
Also just watching them work was very
inspiring. They were very friendly and
very down to earth. They hold many
W/shops throughout the year. If you don’t
like the cold I wouldn’t recommend going
in winter like I did but then again I didn’t
want to wait for the next W/Shop. Luckily
the weather wasn’t too bad compared to
our outing to Lithgow last year, when I
froze my bum off. It actually snowed. (Oh
well the company was good). Lunch and
dinner is included in your price. If you
want more info you can come to me for a
brochure or go to their website
www.photoworkshops.com.au or call
Victoria Jefferys on 0412 009 982.
Irena Hayes
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“Great photography is
about depth of feeling,
not depth of field - Peter
Adams"
Member Profile –
Mr. Brian Coleman
How and why did you start in photography?
“Seemed a good idea after WWII, when film and
other supplies became available. Fostered when,
as a student chemist, I had to learn how to take
technical shots”.
Do you remember your first camera?
“Yes, Kodak Auto graphic (& on 127 film – 4.5cm
X 6cm)”.
What’s your most successful photo?
“Close-up of an orb-spinner spider. (14/15 in FCC
Interclub)”.
What type of photography do you find the
hardest to take?
“Human portraits”.
What photos do you like to take the best?
“Landscape, close-ups – animals, flowers and table
tops”.
Who’s photos in the Camera Club do you
admire the most?
“Jono Fern’s”.
What are your thoughts on today’s Judges?
“As ever, mostly informative, very few irritating”.
What advice would you give to a new beginner
in photography?
“Learn your craft before trying to be “arty”.
Do you follow any sport or team or have a hobby?
“No sport. Lots of interests; gardening, pets, Church activities
– all “feed” my photography hobby”.
What has been your favourite holiday and travels?
“Touring W. Canada & W. and N.E. USA plus Alaska”.
Name one thing we don’t know about you?
“What proportion of my shots are discarded?”
Where do you see the Camera Club heading?
“Gradually expanding in numbers and recognition”.
Margaret: “What’s with the bucket, Brian?”
Brian: “Don’t look at me, I didn’t put it there”.
Margaret and Brian are discussing
photography at one of our outings to
Fagan Park.
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Results for August
Point Score Competition
2005
Leading Five Members
as at 25 August 2005
A Grade
Slides Colour Prints
Jono Ferns 98 Keith Gillard 137
Brian Coleman 84 Jo-Anne Windsor 136
Ron Glinn 45 Brian Coleman 120
Warwick Mahoney 7 Jono Ferns 64
Paul Waite 30
Mono Prints Mini Prints
Jo-Anne Windsor 85 Jo-Anne Windsor 93
Warwick Mahoney 51 James Watkins 30
Brian Coleman 17 Margaret Fagg 10
Keith Gillard 9 Brian Coleman 3
Margaret Fagg 0 Malcolm Kleu 2
B Grade
Slides Colour Prints
Robert Hoehne 133 Mark Eagles 156
Alia Naughton 64 Tony Spence 108
Jacy Harding 36 Robert Brear 100
Allan De Saxe 24 Irena Hayes 99
Ron Jessel 6 Maria Brear 93
Mono Prints Mini Prints
Alia Naughton 87 Alia Naughton 99
Tony Spence 54 Tony Spence 75
Nikolai Belousov 52 Ron Glinn 50
Maria Brear 49 Allan De Saxe 44
Chris Cook 46 Irena Hayes 39
Point Score 2005 Roundup The competition night on 23 August had 112 entries. This is not as large as some other nights but was still a very good number of entries. As you can see from the scores above, the competition is hotting up in some areas. In A Grade Colour Prints only one point separates Keith Gillard and Jo-Anne Windsor. The Competition Committee (myself, Chris Cook and Robert and Maria Brear) is to meet soon to look at next year’s competition. Right now we are looking for suggestions for set subjects for the new competition. Please eMail any suggestions to me at [email protected]. All welcome. Next year there will be changes to the competition. As you will recall, the new Competition Rules were passed at the Special General Meeting held on 9 August 2005. These new rules will be in force for next year’s competition starting in February. It is important that you read and understand the new rules. I will remind members of the significant changes in the rules in coming newsletters.
Bob Cook
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COMING UP IN NEXT ISSUES
Buy/Sell & Borrow (Do you have anything to sell?)
Image of the Month
Photography Tips & Tricks / Photoshop
Share you Story / Member Profile (Who will it be?)
