FROM THE CIRCLES By Candia Peterson ARPS
One of the great pleasures of my regular interaction with the RPS and everything it has to offer is my monthly participation in one of the eCircles of the Landscape Group. In our group we are ten in number and the members have been reasonably consistent in the couple of years since I joined. Every month, we each submit an image into a shared Dropbox folder along with a short paragraph describing a little bit about the image. Where were we, why was it interesting and what was our motivation; what were the difficulties or challenges and, possibly, why are we satisfied – or sometimes not – with the result. We also include our camera and lens details, camera settings, tripod or not and a brief description of what we did in post. Occasionally one of us will enter two versions of an image for critical comparison: perhaps the same shot in black and white and in colour or perhaps two different crops or orientations. The images can be new or from the archives and the subjects within the landscape genre range from up close and personal to the wide and expansive. Once all images are submitted by the end of the month, comments are invited and are in by the 15th of the succeeding month. Comments are encouraged to be both constructive and politely critical. “Wow, what a shot” is discouraged without qualification but we follow a set of loose guidelines in which we say what particularly attracts us to the image, what – if anything – we don’t like or where we think improvements could be made. The latter might be to do with crop, treatment of highlights or shadows, composition – anything really. Over the period of the pandemic, we have become rather close as a group and our participation in the Circle has gone beyond the monthly sharing of images. We frequently share articles and YouTube videos that we have enjoyed or found instructive and, most importantly, since last year – in the Brave New World of virtual meetings – we have started a monthly Zoom call in which we just chew the fat together on a huge range of topics that usually start photographically and end up with something Covid (inevitably!!). Of the ten members of the group, three of us are permanently outside of the UK – one in Switzerland, one in the Lot region of Southwest France and me in the Northeast of the US. Our Blighty-based members are from the South East of England to the far North of Scotland and several points in between. I’ve asked the members of our Circle to choose their favourite images from the past twelve months and I think you will see that not only is there a lot of talent in the group, we also enjoy a wide range of subjects, style, location and interpretation. September 2021 Volume 6 Number 6
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