A good number of excellent entries for both sections of our first monthly competition of the new season. And the first month using our new competition format where each month will have a colour or mono section in Part 1 and the second section will be on a theme or genre.

The Genre this month was Tryptych and our members  took up the challenge with enthusiasm. Congratulations to Adrian who came first in both sections, congratulations to the other winners and well done everyone for the high standard of entries.

Results are here

Last Friday saw a successful evening with a wide variety of Hats shown as the main subject. The following two themes were chosen for the next meeting for a date to be fixed in early January. (December has proved difficult in the past because of members numerous seasonal commitments.)

1.  Transport – as a warm up and review for possible entries into the Club monthly competition for February (25th January hand in date) .
2.  Shoes. Yes you read it correctly, Shoes! That should stretch your imagination.

A longer term theme, to be completed by the April meeting has a heritage and historical record touch about it,

3.   Ghost signs – meaning the type of often faded and partial advertising or premises signs painted on walls and gable ends of usually brick buildings.  Let’s see what can be found.

Bill Salkeld=

Once again, the Wilmslow Guild Photographic Society (WGPS) annual competition drew hundreds of print & digital entries from keen members, with subjects as varied as portraits, landscapes, sport and natural history. They were assessed by a panel of 3 external judges.

The Society always holds a follow-up evening session with one of the judges returning to provide feedback on the entries and this is always proves a very rewarding and informative evening for members.

In the print category, the winners were (in the photo left to right) Michael Hilton, Les Stringer and John Dennis.

Michael won two categories: Portrait & People with his image titled “Time to Remember” taken at an RPS portrait day with an actor playing the part of a weary mill worker and shot in natural light from a window, and the Monochrome category with his image titled “Flying High” taken in London, the buildings themselves provided an excellent image, but capturing the bird turned it into a winning image.

Les entered many high scoring images but in the colour category his print “In the Early Morning Light” was the winner.  It was taken at dawn at the Lofoten Islands in Northern Norway in late February.  John Dennis had the distinction of winning the top 4 places in the Natural History category – his winning image “Female Leopard” was taken while on safari in Kafue National Park, Zambia – the guide cut the engine on the boat and let it drift past the leopard.

The ‘Challenge’ is to take one frame using 35mm film on an old fashioned camera. 

If you wish to have a go please sign up with me. The idea is that you will have the camera for one week to choose and capture your subject. The camera will then be passed on to the next person on the list.

When all the frames on the film have been exposed, I will have it developed, and we will present the results at a members’ evening, when the members will be able to choose their winner, who will receive a suitable reward.

The camera is loaded with Fujifilm Superia X-tra, a 400 asa print film, and has a 50mm lens.

The camera settings that are adjustable are ;-

Shutter speed. 1/30th, 1/60th, 1/125th, 1/250th and 1/500th. There is also a bulb setting for timed exposure, and a clockwork delayed shutter release. There is also a cable release if you want to use a tripod.

Aperture. f2, f2.8, f4, f5.6, f8, f11 and f16. The lens iris has a manual diaphragm. This means that you can focus at f2, but then need to STOP THE LENS DOWN MANUALLY to the f stop setting required for exposure. If you forget you will, obviously, overexpose your photograph.

If you need an exposure meter, and don’t have an old one lying around, you could use your digital camera to decide on the exposure, or there are apps available for your smart phone that will do the job. Failing that there is always the f16 rule!

Please take one, and only one exposure. When you have taken your photograph DO NOT ADVANCE THE FILM.

Pass the camera on to the next photographer on the list. He or she can then wind the film on just before they take their picture.

Any questions, let me know….. You can get in touch on 01625 820768

Happy snapping

David Hardy

Fancy entering an external Photographic Competition?

We received an email from SITTP (Society of International Travel & Tourism Photographers) with information about their monthly competitions. You don’t have to be a member and it’s free to enter.  Note: I believe you will have to zip your jpeg images when you upload them.

Follow the links to enter:

This month’s Photographic Competitions are:

My Voyage of Discovery Images from anything on your travels, whether it’s street photography through to stunning places (whatever you discover).

http://sittp.com/voy/

Best of Nature

This month’s competition solely emphasises on all things of ‘Nature’, whether it be the force of Mother Nature or animals living their daily lives.

http://sinwp.com/best/

Equestrian Events This month’s competition is Equestrian Events photography, anything from dressage, in-hand showing, cross country and show jumping to name a few.

http://sifgp.com/hum/

The Human Form

This month’s competition focuses on the study and appreciation of the beauty of the human body.

http://sifgp.com/hum/

Last months winners can be found at:

Amazing Insects http://sinwp.com/insect/1st.htm

All Sports http://sislp.com/all/1st.htm

World we live in http://sittp.com/wwli/1st.htm

Lovable pets http://www.swpp.co.uk/lpets/1st.htm

Details of the 2016-17 programme are available here

The programme is now displayed in a new calendar format which displays more information in an accessible way

• You can ‘subscribe’ to the calendar and have it downloaded and updated in your phone or desktop calendar
• You can see different views of the calendar via the drop down option on the top right. The default view is stream but try the others for alternative views. The agenda view for example is neat and also printable.
• Clicking on an entry will display all the event details on its own page
• You can filter the calendar using the drop down on the top left. You can toggle the different categories on and off (so you can restrict the list to one or more categories of event).
  • Competition entry dates are shown as a separate category
  • In the future we will likely add more events in different categories – such as Challenge Group, Club Outings, Photo Opportunities
  • The different categories have their own ‘logo’ and colour code
• We can add extra text against an event to provide a more detailed description. We haven’t had the time to do this yet but as an example there is extra detail on the Photo Journalism event on 5th October. The text isn’t always visible initially – if not there are various ways to show it. Hover over or click on an event in Posterboard or Month view or click ‘+’ in Agenda.

So give it a go and look round  the various options to get familiar – hopefully you’ll find it a useful new addition to the site.

Printed programmes will be available at the first meeting.

The site is back on the new server and most things are OK.  There is an issue with email not being delivered but it is being investigated…

The WGPS website will shortly be migrating to a new server and may be unavailable for a few hours.

Back soon!

Following the AGM decision to revise the format of competitions for next season you can download the schedule from here

The upload portal has been updated to reflect the new format.

Following last week’s tense announcements of the results of the WGPS 2015-16 Photographer of the Year Competition (based on accumulated scores throughout the season):

– the full results are posted here and the results of Competition 6 are also available here.

Last Wednesday was an excellent practical evening at the Guild Photographic Society. George Franks came along and set up 4 tables with various setups to practice some high speed flash techniques.  George started with a brief introductory talk and then demonstrated each setup and helped the members take some high speed flash photos.  Two of the setups involved dropping objects into water with the water splashes appearing frozen, one had water dripping into a cocktail glass creating droplets (with images in the droplet) as well as it splashing into the glass and the fourth had wisps of smoke rising from a joystick.

The flash, mostly off-camera, with a remote trigger created the freezing effect. The initial settings were: camera on manual with a synch speed of 1/125, ISO 100-400, F8 and the flash set to 1/32 of power.  However, these settings would need to be experimented with to get the perfect shot.

Focusing was set initially by autofocus and then the focussing turned to manual. The object could then be dropped (always in the same vertical plane, knowing the focussing wouldn’t change).

A great fun evening of hands-on experience, with George giving us plenty of know-how and members coming away with knowledge about the technique and those who tried the technique on the night getting some good shots. So DO TRY THIS AT HOME.

Apologies, but the session on Thursday 5th May has been postponed.

Results from the Open DPI and the ‘Close Up’ theme are available here

See how WGPS has done in the L&CPU’s annual print and digital image competitions; click on the LCPU website link here.

This coming Wednesday 16th March will now be dedicated to portrait photography.  Alan Angel will demonstrate portrait photography using studio flash; members can then then try out our own studio flash kit, which can be borrowed for a small fee.

The inter-club DPI competition has been cancelled.

The results of last night’s Open Print competition and the latest POTY results are now available via the results page.

A reminder to the Winners – please post DPIs of your winning prints via the upload portal so that Dave has them available for external competition entries.

Following a brilliant display of the new technique of ‘speed judging’ (thanks Christine – great job!) the results are now available here

and the Photographer of the Year table is here

Last Friday some of our members went on a night-time walk around Wilmslow.  This was one of our semi-regular Friday meetings.

Here’s a picture from Roger Hand:

The format of Competition #5 is that it has 2 parts:

• Part 1: DPI Open mono
• Part 2: DPI Theme.  The theme for the 2nd theme comp is “Close Up” – interpret this any way you like.  DPI images for this can be colour or mono.
• The hand-in date for Competition #5 is Wednesday 16th March

Please note that the Members Meeting scheduled for  April 27 will now be on May 11 …

George Franks High Speed Flash meeting scheduled for May 11 will be on April 27

The results of the recent print competition are available here.

Another selection of quality entries (and winners) from both new and established members.

As a number of members have notified us the colour print results were initially incorrect (due to an error early in the list which had a knock on effect down the list). Apologies. These have been corrected and the results  now reflect the scores awarded on the night.  (On the plus side it’s encouraging to know that we have so many visitors to the site!)

Please can the winners upload a DPI of their prints so that we can make them available for use in external comps. The print upload portal is here 

The format of Competition #3 is that it has 2 parts:

• Part 1: DPI Open colour
• Part 2: DPI Theme, can be mono or colour, author’s choice.

  The theme for that first themed competition is ‘part of the body’.  This can be anybody’s body, any animal’s body or anything’s body. i.e. as long as it has a body you can photograph it, but it must only be part of the body, not the whole thing.

• The hand-in date for Competition #3 is Wednesday 27^th January

Results from the Annual DPI competition are now available here. Another set of quality entries. Congratulations to the winners. Apologies for the delay in posting these – a small and unusual glitch in our carefully structured and finely honed processing methodology!

Winning photos will be added to the gallery and made available for external competitions.

(If you had a winning print entry and haven’t yet uploaded it we’d be grateful if you would … here.)

A slew of quality images in our November DPI competition. Interestingly a high number of mono entries this month (44) relative to colour (54). Congratulations to David Royle with a first in mono and second in colour. Results in detail here.

The gallery has been updated with some of the winning images from this competition and the annual (more to be added soon).

Following the judge’s review last week the complete results of the 2015 annual print competition are posted on the results page … here

The DPI entries will be reviewed by a judge on 11 Nov and the full results posted on the site a week or so later.