DIG News - November 2018
‘Concert Hall Wave’ by Paul Bather ARPS Winner of the DIG monthly competition for October.
DIG MEMBER SURVEY Thank you to all of those who completed the survey for us, some 515 of you in the end, which is a great sample for us to work on. The committee really appreciate such a great response to our request. It is interesting to see the subtle change since our last member survey in 2016.
A few different questions at the end there but interestingly a few less members identifying as Landscape or Travel photographers.
Obviously since 2016 Adobe CC has come in to play, with some still remaining on their CS series. This is just a quick peek at the early stats. More work will be done in the next few weeks on all the other areas we asked you about.
MONTHLY COMPETITION This month’s winner is someone who has only recently started entering the DIG monthly online comp so it is especially good to see him winning. Congratulations Paul Bather ARPS on “Concert Hall Wave” as seen on the front page of this DIG News. Here is what Paul had to tell us about his image…..
Concert Hall Wave This photograph was one of a series of pictures taken at the amazing Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles during a recent trip. The picture was taken, hand held at ISO 400 in a shaded area and deliberately under exposed at the time of taking the photograph. In post processing using Lightroom and Photoshop, clarity, vibrancy and saturation were increased which resulted in the effect of enhancing the colours seen at the time. Paul Bather ARPS
2nd placed is ‘not a selfie MFA’ by Rex Waygood
then we have two joint 3rd placed images ‘Body Art’ by Janet Haines ARPS
‘The Boatman’ by Ashish Chalapuram
DIG MEMBER DISTINCTIONS After the summer recess Assessments are starting up and we have the following members to congratulate this month. William George LRPS Steve Hickman LRPS Tony McMaster LRPS
Perthshire St Austell Rugby
Diane Seddon ARPS Barry Hoffman ARPS Tze Yuen Lee ARPS
Louth Berkhamsted Hong Kong
The above ARPS successes were all in the Fine Art category. All successful panels will be featured in the next issue of DIG Accolade.
SOCIETY AWARDS 2018 For the first time the Awards ceremony will be live streamed and can be watched on the RPS Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/royalphotographicsociety/ So tune in on Thursday November 29th at around 19.00 (GMT)
DIG MEMBER GALLERIES Two more member galleries for you to link to and enjoy. Remember to get your work featured upload some work to your own RPS Gallery by going to My RPS and following the links there. In this album I have tried to illustrate a relationship between ‘pairs’ of images so that as you look at each of them there is a colour, texture or shape that relates to the previous or next image. This album is work in progress as I see how many ‘pairs’ I can create. The first image features the name of a favourite artist and image two is of the staircase n his house. If I cannot see a relationship between two images then they get removed, the final images ‘red and white’ is on borrowed time! Images taken on camera and iPhone with limited editing.
Click on the images to take you to their galleries.
P.I. COMP – Winner presentations
Selector Rachael Talibart presents a RPS Ribbon to Marilyn Steward ARPS
Rachael with another RPS Ribbon winner Roger Norton LRPS
WELCOME to our new members this month… Michael Foley LRPS Elaine Hillson Derek Mole Andre Dare Phillip Barnes ARPS Les Hawkins Bruce Deacon LRPS Don Hodgson Alison Small Iain Cathro Stephen Smith Andy Davis Robert Manley
Cardiff Lampeter Birmingham Brentwood Runcorn Whitstable Bedford Lee on Solent Chatham Dundee Usk Ashford London
Martin Walters LRPS Robert Darts LRPS Jeff Fugler Tony Mancell Sue Wright David Haynes Peter Jordon Geoff Popham Linda Meaton David Paskin Adele Gibson LRPS Lorraine Clifton
Portishead Thetford Camarthen Leamington Uxbridge Sherborne Corringham New Zealand Bristol Llanelli Stevenage Richmond
DIG FACEBOOK Our closed user Group Facebook account jogs along nicely with a steady upload of images from members, or queries and comments for others to engage with. It is polite and friendly. Only DIG members are eligible to join so we validate each application against the membership lists. If you would like to join us then go to https://www.facebook.com/groups/255778611506306/ One thing that Facebook is famous for is their ‘Like’ facility. To my mind for the DIG Group this is a cop out from commenting properly. Fair enough to use the tick (or one of the other linked icons) but then go on to qualify that with a thoughtful statement. By giving feedback it makes us stop long enough on an image to think it through and both parties learn from that. We have recently had one comment to a members image that particularly impressed us. It is extremely helpful and well put together. It makes a super example, but in fairness we wouldn’t expect every piece of feedback to be so fulsome as this one….
DIG CENTRES All DIG Centre meetings are open to everyone. Each puts on a minimum of 4 meetings p.a., offering varied and inspiring content. All welcome to every DIG meeting; members and nonMembers alike. By clicking on any of the Ads it will take you to the RPS Events pages where more information can be found about the meetings.
Thames Valley Centre
DIG Eastern Centre
DIG Southern
DIG Western Centre
SIG LINK By clicking on any of the Ads it will take you to the RPS Events pages where more information can be found about the meetings. Imaging Science Group
Landscape Group
Headquarters asked for us to promote this..
A UK MEMBER This month Leslie Naylor ARPS, from Leeds, is our UK based contributor. We try to ask members who live too far from DIG Centres to participate there to write for us. So if you meet that criteria and would like to write a short piece then do get in touch.
Leslie Naylor ARPS I was surprised, and flattered to get an e-mail from Janet Haines, requesting an article for DIG News, but the condition :- “You can write about whatever you like so long as it is photography based” nicely lets me off the hook. I find it is useful to have a valid reason for taking photographs. At one time I used my camera plus notebook as a diary of where I had travelled, and one of the few advantages of a digital camera over a film camera is the automatic recording of date and time and GPS of each photo. For some years my camera was for recording my children's activities, followed by grandchildren, but not yet great grandchildren. My ARPS I did because I was interested in flowers, but I was stimulated into getting on with it by us learning my wife had a fatal illness and we wished to show that didn't prevent us enjoying life. She got her LPRS at about the same time About five years ago, a photography student at Leeds University asked for photos for a project she was doing, in which several people had to send her a photo, taken on the exact hour that she specified. My “Selfie” was what I took for 5 o'clock. It needed a little bit of planning, plus a camera with a tilting and rotating screen, a tripod and delayed action, to give me time to get back into bed, and close my eyes.
It is interesting to find what one does on the exact hour. My most common activity was a cup of coffee, but I also was on a bus several times, which gave me the idea of taking pictures on buses, with the front seat upstairs being my favourite location. These bus pictures are some of what I took in the next few weeks.
AN OVERSEAS MEMBER Hans Abplanalp ARPS has been a long time DIG member who lives in Switzerland. His membership lapsed earlier this year but it is lovely that he has decided to rejoin us – welcome back Hans. I recently saw Hans super ARPS panel but because it is not an achievement during 2018 it means it won’t be featured in our DIG Accolade. So I thought it would be good to ask Hans to show it to us here and write a short piece about it for this months DIG News.
As a keen amateur photographer living in Switzerland it’s hardly surprising that I take landscape photographs, ten of which gained me the Licentiateship. However, I thought that I would need something a little different and more creative for an attempt at the Associateship. But what!
After long and careful consideration I turned to drink, well not actually the liquid, but the vessels. Glasses come in a huge variety of interesting shapes and sizes, and I find that wine glasses, in particular, have very pleasing forms. It was obvious to me that simply taking a shot of various glasses was going to be pretty boring and so I tried a variety of combinations of mostly wine glasses which worked well. It was then a question of lighting which, after some experimentation, actually proved to be quite straightforward.
All the images were backlit through tracing paper with black card at the sides to accentuate the outlines. I lit all the images in the same way to ensure consistency throughout the panel. Background colours were tweaked in Photoshop. I included three images with a black background to add more punch to the layout. Those three were taken in exactly the same way but were simply inversed in Photoshop. While I was quite pleased with the results, there was something missing; the icing on the cake so to speak. I then hit on the idea of including a marble in each shot to tie them all together visually.
With so much going on we would encourage our DIG Members to let us know if they are going to be holding an exhibition of their work, or know of something happening in their area that other DIG members might want to know about. The deadline for DIG News is the 25th of the month prior (ie October 25th was the deadline for the November issue). We aim to get the publication online and out to members by the first week of every month. Regards
Janet
Janet Haines ARPS DIG Chair digchair@rps.org