Contents THE WCPF EXECUTIVE

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2 THE WCPF EXECUTIVE Because of concerns about publishing details of the Executive Members addresses, phone numbers and addresses in this electronic newsletter, which is now being seen by a far wider audience, it has been decided not to publish these details in this newsletter in future. A Who s Who is appended, and if you need to contact any individual, please consult the latest Directory, or fill in the Contact Us form at where your query will be forwarded to the relevant person. President - Brian Galbraith CPAGB. Vice President - Eddy Lane ARPS : DPAGB Hon Sec - Alan James Treasurer - Paul Kessler LRPS, CPAGB Newsletter Editor - Ann Owens C&G (Dist) Travelling Critique Sec - Helen Burridge Audio Visual Sec - Carole Attrell Kingswood Salver & Knightshayes Trophy Sec - Carol Wilson Directory Sec - Jim Eastaugh LRPS MPX Secretaries- Pam & Eddy Lane (both ARPS : DPAGB) MPIX Secretary - Pam Sherren ARPS EFIAP DPAGB BPE2*. PAGB Competition Sec - John Tilsley ARPS, DPAGB, APAGB PAGB Awards Officer - Di Tilsley CPAGB Assistant to DPIC Sec: Paula Graham ARPS WCPF Rep to PAGB - Barrie Castle LRPS Webmaster - Bill Aven APAGB, DPAGB, LRPS Peter Fry ARPS, DPAGB, BPE1* Contents DIARY DATES 3 PRESIDENT S PIECE 4 COLOUR IT 5 DO TELL 6/7 EXPLORING DIGITAL TECHNIQUES 7 COMPETITIONS, EH? 8 PAGB DISTINCTIONS ADVISORY DAY 9 SOUTH DEVON SALON OF PHOTOGRAPHY 10 PLEASE BE AWARE THAT VIEWS EXPRESSED BY INDIVIDUALS IN THIS NEWSLETTER ARE NOT NECESSARILY THOSE OF THE WCPF. 2

3 DIARY DATES E v e n t 3rd April Bath Photographic Society presents a talk by Willie Cheung FRPS. Commences 7.30pm. Tickets 8 Full details at 14th April WCPF AV COMPETITION 21st April WCPF Members Projected Images Exhibition 29th April Annual Memorial Lecture with wildlife photographer Mark Carwardine. Details Talk entitled My Passion for Photography at the University of Bath BA2 7AY At Clyst St Mary Village Hall, Nr Exeter. EX5 1BG between Details at At The Corn Exchange, Exeter. EX1 1BW. commencing at 10.00am More details from Colin English - events@southamptoncameraclub.co.uk 13th - 26th May. WCPF Members Print Exhibition At Rook Lane, Frome BA11 1DF. From 10.00am om. 24th June. RPS DiG Meeting exploring RAW. Layers and Layer Masks. 5/ 3 entrance. Emal - janet.haines@btopenworld.com for more. At Merryfield Hall, Ilton, Somerset. TA19 9HG. Meet at for start till 4.00pm. Pre-booked lunches available. 14th July. PAGB Inter Federation Projected Digital Image Club Competition. At The Arts Centre, Warwick University. Driving details go to visiting/directions/car/ 3rd September - 7th October : Exhibition of Kingswood Photographic Society Members Work At The Pound, Pound Pill, Corsham, Wilts. SN13 9HX. 23rd September. RPS DiG meeting exploring Textures and Blending Layers. 5/ 3 entrance. janet.haines@btopenworld.com for more. At Merryfield Hall, Ilton, Somerset. TA19 9HG. Meet at for start till 4.00pm. Pre-booked lunches available. 7th October Kingswood Photographic Convention See the work of renowned Photogtraphers - Des Clinton, FRPS : Tony Dudley and Gijs van Gent Same venue as above. Reserve tickets or more information contact - adrianherring@aol.com or vanessaherring@gmail.com 13th October WCPF AGM and closing date for Kingswood Salver entries 10th November WCPF Kingswood Salver 16th December. RPS DiG Meeting provisionally exploring Lightroom software. 5/ 3 entrance. janet.haines@btopenworld.com for more. At The Village Hall, Clyst St Mary, Exeter. EX5 1BG. At the above venue. At Merryfield Hall, Ilton, Somerset. TA19 9HG. Meet at for start till 4.00pm. Pre-booked lunches available. 3

4 PRESIDENT S PIECE I hope you enjoy reading this latest WCPF Newsletter, and are now getting out in the warmer weather to hone your photographic skills. The theme was Co-operation for the 2012 Knightshayes Trophy, judged at the Council Meeting on 10 th March.. The winning picture, by Victor Tullin of Penryn Camera Club, is very powerful and emotional, epitomising for me the sort of scenario when co-operation is not just a very good thing, but is a matter of life and death. See Victor's picture, and some other excellent images, at Next year the subject is Wrecked. Also at the Council Meeting, we had a lively talk from Tracey Rich, whose anecdotes about the wildlife she mingles with provided an extra dimension to her superb photographic work should be a busy year for participation in all sorts of sport, one of the reasons the UK made our successful bid for the 2012 Olympics. Some of us may be rather past the running-about stage, but how about capturing a bit more action with your camera this year? You don't have to have a huge lens and be in the front row at the final of the 100m to get great sports pictures. How about a local football match? The relegation and promotion battles, and the final stages of competitions are around this time of year. The sweat on the brow, the pain in the face, the effort being made, is just as dramatic as at higher levels. And the local sports clubs websites will be glad of a few decent pictures. The Bristol International Salon 2012 acceptances have been announced very recently. Did you get one in? It is great to have such a prestigious event organised within our federation, and I know many of you enter enthusiastically every year. Now, with the new South Devon Salon open for entries, here is a new opportunity to support another local photographic event. The organising team are members of Newton Abbot Photographic Club, and you will find entry details on their website The 2012 WCPF Members Exhibition will very soon be selected, and we trust the distinguished panel will choose yet another superb exhibition from the work you have submitted. We will have a show of all submitted Projected Images (with their marks) at the Corn Exchange in Exeter on Saturday 21 st April. There are still seats available just come along and pay on the door, and why not bring some friends too? The framed prints will be up on display at the excellent Rook Lane Gallery in Frome from 13 th to 26 th May. I have mentioned before the search for exhibition venues in the western part of the federation, to give easier access to more western clubs. I am delighted to announce that in 2013 the print Exhibition will be held at Buckfast Abbey in South Devon. The Medieval Guesthall is a delightful old building, and the complex is visited daily by lots of people.the site is an ideal place for a club visit, with spacious grounds, lots of interesting old buildings in delightful honey-coloured stone, with the glorious Abbey as the centrepiece.they also do a super Devon Cream Tea, so why not organise a club members outing for May 2013! Next WCPF event coming up is the Audio Visual Competition, with lots of entries to enjoy this year. Clyst St Mary Village Hall on Saturday 14 th April is the place. As this is Carol Attrell's last year as organiser, I hope she will go out on a high, with a really good day. Brian Galbraith

5 COLOUR IT? Within the seemingly endless opportunities of computer editing many of us have tried adding or retaining a splash of colour in a monochrome image so as to add impact. As in most things photographic, results can be a bit unpredictable. However, retaining a brightly coloured flower amongst an arrangement of monochrome rocks might be quite spectacular if you can get it just right. We can do it easily now because the image started out in colour as most of our photographs do. A similar effect was much more difficult to achieve in darkroom days, but not impossible although results were a little subdued. The technique was borrowed from watercolour artists and their established pen and wash technique where a black ink drawing would be tinted with pale washes of colour. Architects rather liked that presentation, too. Restricted to using printing paper, the photographer had to find a colouring medium which would bond to his monochrome print, be colour fast and allow the underlying tones to show through. Food dyes seemed to fill the bill and could be diluted as necessary. Carried to an extreme the whole black and white picture could be changed to colour by painting with artists brushes. It might seem that today there is not much call for any technique, digital or otherwise, that will produce a full colour image from a black and white original. Who would want to be bothered with such a seemingly unnecessary transition in this age of colour photography? Surprisingly there are people who spend all of their time on just that in the U.S.A at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. The amazing orbiting Hubble Telescope photographs celestial objects millions of light years away in black and white or, more precisely, greyscale. In order to do that it needs something more sophisticated than a Nikon or Canon set to 1/250 th at f8. Its several cameras, locked on to a distant galaxy might need 1000 or more shots taken over many days and amounting to 20 to 30 hours of exposure time. Exposures are made successively through several filters, some of which only pass infra-red or ultraviolet radiation and others admit wavelengths peculiar to various elements, such as hydrogen. The greyscale images may be all that some astronomers need to pursue their research but for others and for the general public something extra is needed colour. So the clever chaps at NASA open up Photoshop and get busy. They assign layers to the individual exposures and then scale and align them all so that all are in register. The lack of alignment and differences in scale arise because Hubble takes its pictures on the move in orbit. It must be quite difficult as many of us know from our own modest efforts to combine a few simple terrestrial images. Then the exciting part begins. They assign colours to the individual layers according to a pre-arranged code of practice so that a particular filtered wavelength uses a particular colour in almost every completed image. Usefully, the infra red and ultra violet wavelengths are then made visible to us. From all of this emerges a full colour image, not in the natural colours that a space traveller might witness but one that impresses as well as informs. The image shown is The Heart of the Whirlpool Galaxy. Photo credit: NASA and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScl/AURA) Whirlpool Nebula CLUBMAN

6 Do Tell... The last Newsletter asked us, the clubs, do we do anything else other than competitions? Do Tell was the final quote. Well, Exmouth Photo Group do: in fact a couple of years ago we even dropped one of our competitions because we felt we had too many. Members were more keen to see work from other members, not just the images allowed in each competition. Every year we have two or three project evenings where any member, new or old, is encouraged to take up, say, a quarter, half or even whole evening to show their latest work or any ideas they re working on. In fact just about anything. Usually two members volunteer to entertain the rest of the members, each taking half an evening or sometimes joining a project together. Let me tell you about our last last project evening, for instance? Don Leech, a long standing member, showed us 3D Photography. He started by explaining that he had always been interested in Stereoscopic Photography - but what was so amazing was that he had lost the sight of one eye when he was a child so he is unable to appreciate the full effect of what he showed us. All I can say it was completely different: he gave us all a pair of red/cyan glasses and proceeded to show us how he managed to produce each image. Don showed us how he took the two images, the second with the camera about 6 cms to the right of the first one, how he put it into an anaglyph program to produce the final 3D processed image. In Don s case most of it was done mathematically because of his sight and he wanted the audience to participate by asking us to award marks out of 10 on the success of each image. He wanted to show failures as well, and explain the reasons they failed. We had images jumping out at us and images seemingly going deep back behind the screen - a most interesting project. On the Le! - the 3-D image showing the camera shi! and the characteristic red and green separation. On the right - the image as viewed through 3-D spectacles with separate red/green lenses, which created the astonishing effect. Both images by Don Leech. This was followed by Brian Ward, another long standing member. He has long been known for his slightly underexposed landscape slide work, always taken using Kodak film, f11 using a 24mm lens. First of all he showed us some of his older slides which had been professionally scanned then went on to explain that he really wanted to take pictures of people. As someone who is not comfortable with taking photos of people he decided to do all his images holding the camera hip height and with a wide angle lens, his favourite lens. He then proceeded to show the audience images he had taken at fairs, events and even in India - anywhere with lots of people. These worked very well, obviously quite a lot of misses but the angles and viewpoints were very different. We also saw some of Brian s new Joiner images, something completely different. Brian also showed us images from Venice, again in his style, even more interesting for me because I was going to Venice a couple of days later. All very inspirational. 6

7 I think the whole club came away from the meeting very inspired. We now eagerly await the next project. Shot %om the hip by Brian Ward. Sheila Haycox EXPLORING DIGITAL TECHNIQUES Want to know more about Photoshop Plug-ins? What about software like Lightroom? Ever wondered how those Gold Medal Winning exponents of our hobby achieve such consistently inspiring images? Think about coming along to the local branch of the Digital Imaging Group, under the auspices of the Royal Photographic Society, which meets four times a year at Ilton in Somerset? Just what do I think I m doing, not only encouraging WCPF members to patronise an RPS event - but to then actively ADVERTISING an event they run?in our newsletter? Well, hang on a minute! We re all photographers, aren t we? With the best will in the world, the committed WCPF Executive are hard pressed enough as it is to run all the events in any year which they already do. Thus, if something photographic is on offer, which seems to fulfill a need, then why keep it a secret? Contrary to popular understanding, non-members of the RPS are very welcome to attend any events they organise, and you only need to pay a couple of pounds more for this privilege. One such opportunity exists at a fairly central location to our Federation at the Merryfield Hall, Ilton, Somerset TA19 9HG. Meetings are organised once every three months, lasting from 10.00am until 4.00pm at a cost of just 5 for non-rps and RPS members and 3 for DiG members. The last meeting explored the plug-in Topaz showing exciting and innovative ways to use it, with examples of images created. The June meeting will cover the RAW interface in Photoshop, layers and layer masks. September sees textures and blending modes being demonstrated. December is penciled in for a close look at Lightroom. Apart from the enticing talks, the Merryfield Hall boasts a really yummy lunchtime menu, at unbeatable prices! Keep an eye on our WCPF Diary Dates page - and also the DIG Western Centre Events page at Can you afford to miss out? Fill a car and come and join in!

8 COMPETITIONS, EH? We search for the unbeatable image, help it tenderly through Photoshop, mount it precisely, hang on the astute comments of our judge then await with trepidation the announcement of the competition winner - only to find that, yet again, someone s entry is better. (Yes Paula - that someone is probably you!) I was a bit intrigued by your beef as we have 3 or 4 internal comps each year, and this seems OK, so I looked up your club s programme and it does appear that you have rather a lot! The good thing about competitions is that they encourage us to prepare work to the best of our ability and then view it alongside that of our colleagues whilst receiving the assessment of an impartial outsider. The bad thing is they can encourage the idea that the competition winner is the best image and, as we all strive to produce better images, then the image that succeeds in competition must be the best image. In my view competitions also tend to encourage the production of an image that shouts, rather than one that smiles and whispers. This is particularly so with projected files. There is no doubt that, in order to improve, we need to look closely at other folks work. At our club we have tried a couple of ideas to encourage this and they have been very successful. For the first, half a dozen members were each persuaded by the Programme Secretary to prepare and deliver a 20 minute talk on My Favourite Photographer. This was a really interesting evening which covered a wide area and time span in photography. It was interesting,too, in the different ways that the presentations were delivered. Another evening was centered on the idea that, as we progress through photography, we develop our own style. Perhaps by studying the style of successful artists or photographers something could be learned of the way in which good images are made? Members selected an artist or photographer whose work appealed to them and then (attempted) to make an image in that style. As you can imagine this required close scrutiny and analysis of the work. Members then presented their results to the club. A very instructive evening, great fun and well supported by members at all levels of experience. We also had a couple of foolish events :- 1) A bad image file was provided and members were invited to improve it. Results varied from much better to unbelievable! 2) Some rather unusual image files were provided and members were asked to supply an appropriate caption. (Hilarious!) So whilst competitions will, and should, remain there is life outside too and hey this is supposed to be fun isn t it? Anyone else got any good ideas? Norman Hedge : Crediton Camera Club 8

9 PAGB DISTINCTIONS ADVISORY DAY Interest in gaining photographic Distinctions either with the PAGB or the RPS continues to draw a lot of interest. The RPS have for several years organised Advisory days for aspiring applications for their distinctions - but the requirements for the PAGB, while is understood they were different` remained a somewhat hit-and-miss affair for photographers wishing to gain a C, D or perhaps even an M. Thanks to the hard work and dedication of Di Tilsley, our PAGB Awards Officer, the first Advisory day specifically for aspiring applicants was organised in our Federation in September It proved to be very popular resulting in several photographers successfully gaining Distinctions. Demand for another such advisory day put Di under pressure to organise a second event. Rod Whelans and Anne Greiner, representing the PAGB Awards Committee travelled down from Scotland to be part of the team of Advisers. John Chamberlin and Barry Mead from the Bristol area completed the team. 50 attendees gathered at Monkton Heathfield, Taunton for the day. 25 were aspiring applicants, seeking advice and guidance on the standard of their potential panels of images, and 25 were observers, some of whom were considering submitting for a Distinction sometime in the future. The day began with Rod explaining the mysteries of assessing images and he illustrated his talk with examples of successful C and D panels. Further examples of past successes were displayed around the room - and boxes of images were available for attendees to browse through. After a coffee break, the assessors each had a table where they were able to offer 1:1 advice on potential submissions, and to explain whether or not they may be worth submitting. Each attendee was able to benefit from the advice of two different assessors. Di had carefully planned the whole day. In the run up to lunchtime, each assessor was assigned about six people for their 1:1 advisory session. After the lunch break, potential Digital Projected panels were shown and critiqued by each assessor in turn. Finally, more assessments took place ensuring that everyone was able to consult with at least two assessors by the end of the day. Di must be congratulated on a very smooth-running occasion. All who attended found the advice given to be very valuable - even if it may not always have been quite what they had hoped to hear! Quite a few attendees have made the decision to go for either a CPAGB or a DPAGB when the WCPF host the next adjudications in November And one or two are even bravely taking the plunge this November, when Belfast in Northern Ireland hosts the event.

10 THE SOUTH DEVON SALON OF INTERNATIONAL PHOTOGRAPHY patronage of PSA, FIAP, UPI ENTRIES OPEN: MARCH 1st CLOSING: JULY 21 OPEN NATURE CREATIVE ALL INFO ON the NEWTON ABBOT WEBSITE: