On 15th November Tynemouth Photographic Society “visited” us at Gosforth with exciting presentations of their work. These exchanges are great fun and we are due to return the favour in March (Thursday 16th). We will have to pull our socks up to match them.
Sadly our pub-home was still undergoing an overrunning re-decoration, and the visit had to be done via zoom.
To start Alan Forster (president) spoke about their Urban group and showed great street photos, showing the potential of making images locally. Then Margaret Warren showed her own selection of images which had several very thoughtful portraits, great macro and close ups and a variety of travel images. Trevor Irmel then showed some very poignant images of very ordinary local Tyneside and Newcastle scenes gathered over the last 50 years. Apparently ordinary street scenes from many years ago are a fascinating reminder of how much has changed when recognising what are now familiar but very different scenes – great value of taking images of things that at the time seem completely routine – and then showed a video parody of a judging night, staged to show what might happen if a judge insensitively spoke his biased mind: this was funny!
Linda McGregor described how she had rekindled their nature group and several lovely examples of their results. Henry Tennant showed us what the Colne Valley had on offer (gorgeous place).Howard Wilson then tried to show an AV made about the National Memorial Arboretum – sadly the file had not survived transfer to our display laptop, and this well timed AV it has just been remembrance day) will be shown at the return visit.
On Tuesday 22nd November we held our newcomer and knockout competitions. Newcomers have not completed 2 seasons of club photography and are bound to feel nervous to submit work, but the brave individuals on Tuesday need not have feared. The images were great and our own judge Arjun gave very insightful and constructive comments before choosing his top three:
Susan Tait won with “Taking a break”, a beautiful mono of a dancer sitting on steps, and also came second with “Lean, strong and powerful” – a study of a horse with lovely detail. Hans Chung’s “Lines in the sky” was third – a cleverly composed minimalist image of contrails on a blue sky (we think!).
We then held our knockout competition: each screen shows two images and by showing hands members vote on a winner and the other is eliminated: 65 times on Tuesday because there were 66 entries. Close votes in the pub audience were passed to the zoom audience whose added votes gave us a result on all but one vote. A superbly interactive evening of sharing images!
Arjun Nambiar’s Little Langdale won
David Cottrell’s starling came second
Peter Stevens’ Evening light and George Pigott’s Otter were semifinalists
Congratulations to all winners on the night
idse
