Mallow Camera Club

As a follow up to the highly successful lecture by Joe Cornish last October I am now delighted to announce that Mr. Tony Worobiec will be doing a lecture and workshop in Mallow on the weekend 26th/27th February 2010.

Tony is a leading Black and White photographer and an expert in digital black and white printing. He trained as a Fine Artist and headed a large design faculty in Dorset for over 20 years. He has won awards for his work in the UK and internationally. He has exhibited at London’s Barbican Gallery and Bradford’s National Museum of Photography.

His first published project, “Rhythms of the Land” featured monochrome landscapes which focused primarily on the structure of the land and the rhythm it creates. The photographs range from the broad sweeping vistas of the North American landscape to the intimate details of the coastline near his Dorset home.

Whilst Tony steadfastly continues to work with scanned film, he warmly embraces the digital revolution. A regular feature writer for various magazines both here in the UK and the US, he has particularly sought to connect traditional darkroom workers with digital alternatives. He has also recognised that working digitally has opened many new avenues which allow the photographer to explore issues that could not have been contemplated using more traditional methods.

On Friday 26th Tony will be doing a lecture and showing some of his own work and on Saturday 27th he will be hosting a workshop where he will go through the process of converting and printing black and white images.

Cost for lecture (open to all) is 7 Euro and tickets are available at the door.
The workshop on Saturday is limited to 30 and must be pre-booked. The cost of the workshop is 25 Euro.
Lecture and workshop booked together 30 Euro.

More information from John Hooton on 087-2516042 or e.mail johnhootonNOSPAM@eircom.net (Remove the “NOSPAM” before emailing him)

The Club Galleries are back! The plugin we used before, fGallery, isn’t being maintained any more and I had to convert the gallery information into WordPress posts and uploads. About an hour’s work in all, and a script that I will publish at some stage on my blog.

The uploading procedure is completely different now however, but it’s easy enough and I have updated the “Upload photos” page above to reflect those changes.

On July 18th photographers around the world will be walking the streets, paths, hills and fields of wherever they live taking photographs of all around them. This year we can join them by photowalking in Cork City.

All you need to do is register on the Cork Photowalk website, and keep an eye on that site or on In Photos for further details. Places are limited to 50, the Dublin one is almost full already, but the Belfast one still has plenty of room like the Cork one.

Pass the word around to members, and to other clubs!

Some of these web sites may stretch the definition of “education” slightly but even looking at photos is an education if they inspire you. Here are the links I talked about at last night’s club meeting:

• Google Reader is a feed reader where you can subscribe to websites that have a feed. See the video below for an explanation of what an RSS feed is and what you can do with it.
• Photonotes
• Boards.ie Photography forum
• Photo.net
• Photography Ireland forums
• Photodoto
• Photojojo
• Strobist
• DIY Photography
• Photosig
• Digital Photography School
• 2 minute Photoshop tricks
• Alkos
• George Barr
• Chromasia
• Camera Porn
• Flak Photo
• JMG Galleries
• Photo Attorney
• Mark Hancock
• Digital Journalist
• Online Photographer
• Fine art photo blog
• Rymus
• Pana Vision
• Inphotos dot org
• Latchiko
• Flickr is a huge photography site with social aspects to it. I’m a member there.
• Redbubble where you can sell your photos. Here’s my gallery there.

And of course, Luminous Landscape.

On Sunday next, March 9th, a number of photographers will meet at The Lough in Cork for a photowalk around this scenic area. I’ll be there for 3pm and all are welcome to come, no matter what type of camera you have or your skill level.

For further details and a map, take a look at the Photowalking around The Lough post on my blog. Unfortunately it does clash with a few other events (who’d have thought a Sunday was so busy?) but hopefully we’ll see a few members there.

Summary notes and links for my talk last night. I’ll expand a little on this as I find time over the next day or so.

Get the GIMP from gimp.org. It’s a free download. The Windows version weighs in at around 16MB, but it also runs on Mac OS X and Linux. (On Mac OS X you’ll have to install the X11 package too)

Essential GIMP tools for photographers:

1. Curves
2. Levels
3. Crop
4. Resize
5. Unsharp Mark

Layers are a very important part of the post processing experience. Learn to use them along with layer masks and modes.

A handy way of creating a polarizer effect on a blue sky is by creating a new transparent layer, set the mode to overlay, and then select the gradient tool. Make sure it’s set to FG->transparent and the foreground colour is black. Draw from the top of your image. Hey Presto!

Dodge/Burn functions do exactly what they do in the darkroom. They brighten and darken areas of the image you apply them to. Remember to apply gently, not like I did last night!

2008-02-11 Update – GIMP For Photographers: Levels covers the basics of using the levels tool!

Rikki O’Neill, a well known and respected Scottish photographer and a Fellow of the RPS will be giving a talk at the Club, next Thursday, October 18th at 8.30pm. This is a RPS sponsored tour and Mallow will be Rikki’s only talk in the south of the country during his short tour of Ireland.

Audrey Murphy of Cork Camera Group has invited members of Mallow Camera Club to join them for an evening with Giles Norman next Tuesday, October 16th. They meet in the Garda Club on Penrose Wharf at 8.30pm

I’ll go if I can, anyone else?

In just over an hour the Moon will become dimmer and almost red in colour as the Earth moves between it and the Sun. I’ll be outside with my camera but first I did some research on photographing the moon and wrote a post about it on my blog.

If you’re out tonight with your camera, put it on a tripod (and use a remote release if you have one, or the camera timer if not), shoot in manual mode, open the aperture as wide as it’ll go and starting with an exposure of about 1/125sec bracket your shots with faster and slower exposures.

The eclipse is due to begin at 10:44pm, it’s getting foggy here in Blarney unfortunately. Hopefully you’ll have clearer skies in Mallow!

Flickr, one of the biggest social photo sites around has a really useful mapping tool. You can view photos by location and it knows about many places in Ireland! Pay Cork a visit and click on some of the markers. You might recognise some well known spots as well as discovering a few new ones too.

I tried searching for Mallow as well. It is found, but I wasn’t able to link directly to it because the link didn’t work. Search for “Mallow, Cork, Ireland” in the box provided. There are a few photos there for your perusal.

If you’re interested, I wrote a bit more about exploring Cork on my own blog too so take a look there for links to other locations around the country and a few more photos I found around Cork.