Last night I attended my first meeting of the Abbotsford Photo Arts Club. Turns out it’s just up the road from me, so it was nice and close. The meeting started around 7pm, and there were maybe 30 people in attendance, though as I understand the club has more than 100 members. The first monday of the month is a judging and show-off night, and the third is a “program” (learning) night. For tonight they had a guest judge in.
After introductions and news about things, the judging began. The guest judge was first, and went though a wack of prints and slides. It seemed he said the same thing over and over as an introduction to the picture for each one…. “The color saturation is good, you can tell that by the [color] here. The depth of field is good, everything that should be in focus, is in focus…” with only minor variations when the color saturation wasn’t good, or everything that should have been in focus wasn’t. Other than the minor droning, there were lots of good tips about how pictures could have been made better, a bit of adjustment in the framing, eliminating this or that, etc. Lots of good info.
A bit after this there was a break and then a different judge started, a disembodied voice from somewhere in the back of the room shouting out numbers as slides were presented on screen. “22.” “19.” “25.” etc. After this the winners were announced and ties were broken by re-viewing the images.
There were a lot of interesting images there, and while I was vastly intimidated by the quality and skill of the people there, I’ll probably still join up ($30/year) and maybe even submit a cool image or two that I might want to put in for judging. Eventually. 🙂
Probably the nicest bonus was that in their newsletter (pdf) there was a note saying there was a Pentax 70-200mm lense for sale. Upon inquiry I went out and met the person (Karen) and a couple of the other APAC folks (Dave and Tony) at a local coffee shop and checked it out, and bought it. I notice now that it was “or OBO”, so I might have gotten it a bit cheaper, but it’s still over $100 cheaper than equivelant lenses I’ve seen in the commission area of the local camera store, and far cheaper than the new ones (although the new ones were of course, newer and of assumidly better quality).
Still, I’m happy with it and plan to shoot off a roll with it ASAP to make sure there are no defects or anything. I now have capabiliites from 35mm-200mm, whoop!
By the way, anyone got a tripod for sale cheap? That’ll be my next purchase I think.