Join us for more relaxed meetings during the summer.   You can bring up to 30 of your images on a USB memory stick that you can share with the others.  Of course, you do not need to share images to attend the meeting.  We hope to see you in Clark Hall!

You are the program, so get those images ready! Bring up to thirty images, or an AV presentation of up to seven minutes.

Of course, you don't have to show images to attend the meeting. 

Presenters should arrive at the meeting venue by 7:15 at the very latest, so there is time to load the images onto the club computer before the start of the evening.
 
If you need detailed help, you can find advice about preparing your images in the Documents section of the club web site.  Go to Documents ==> Competitions & Showcases ==> Image Preparation Guidelines 2020.pdf

Otherwise, it is sufficient to remember that your images should not exceed 1920 pixels on the horizontal, or 1080 on the vertical.  Images should be .jpg, sRGB

A showcase of what club members have been photographing during the summer.

Howard Whiting is an Ontario-based nature photographer, Ontario Master Naturalist, and an accredited member of the Professional Photographers of Canada (PPOC) in Wildlife, Ornithology, Botanical, and Pictorial/Scenic photography. His passion is exploring the natural world and demonstrating that many outstanding photographic opportunities can be found much closer to home than we often imagine.

In this presentation, Howard shares a collection of wildlife, bird, botanical, and landscape photographs, along with the stories behind them. He'll talk about finding subjects, understanding animal behaviour, working with changing light and weather, and the patience and persistence that often go into creating a memorable image. Most of the photographs were made within an hour of his home in Eastern Ontario, proving that remarkable images don't always require travel to distant destinations.

Howard will also discuss the equipment he uses, his approach to post-processing, and some of the lessons he's learned along the way. Whether your interests are wildlife, nature, landscapes, or simply becoming a more observant photographer, you'll leave with ideas and inspiration for your own photographic journey.

Monique Campbell has been a photographer for 35 plus years after graduating from the Western Pacific Academy of Photography in Victoria, British Columbia in 1992. She started to do street photography after she discovered the work of Vivian Maier. Most of her images capture ordinary moments of everyday life. She thrills at photographing a wide spectrum of people that she encounters on the streets especially women.

Monique's presentation inspires photographers to get out and photograph people by embracing the fear and photographing anyway. She will share about 80 photos and stories over 75 minutes. It comes with a handout that can be given to members as a great resource after the talk.

http://www.momentsbymonique.com/

Member Discussion: The Volunteer Challenge

Volunteer demand now outpaces supply, and Council wants your input before choosing a path — grow our volunteer base or scale back activities. This will be an open discussion, and no decisions made at the meeting.

Our first competition of the 2026 - 2027 season is the Nature competition. This includes landscapes, wildlife, birds, plants, flowers, insects and reptiles. The images can be colour or monochrome.  "Hand-of-man" elements shall not be present in the Nature theme, except where those human elements are integral part of the nature story, and should not exceed 10% of the image space. An example would be a barn being the habitat of barn owls, or insects found on domesticated plants. Domesticated or feral animals are not permitted. Domesticated plants like tulips and roses or grape vines are not permitted.

This is a restricted editing competition, so only the following editing techniques are allowed: Cropping, white balance, exposure, contrast, HDR, focus stacking, dodging, burning and removal of camera artifacts (sensor dust, sensor noise) are permitted.  Moving or removing elements (other than camera artifacts) or the use of Al technology is not permitted. Frames or borders are not allowed.

Fluency in the photographic craft, i.e. ease in using photographic tools and techniques and knowing the building blocks of visual design plus useful guidelines for arranging them in picture space (composition) does not produce art any more than fluency in a language means that a person has anything of value to express. ART is conceived in our imagination, our dreams, and our passions. We use CRAFT to give it birth, that is visible or audible form. Freeman's presentation explores this important connection.

Freeman Patterson of Shampers Bluff, New Brunswick, Canada, has had a career in photography and visual design that spans more than 60 years. He has taught innumerable workshops in Canada, South Africa, New Zealand, Australia, Israel, France, the United Kingdom, the USA, and other countries. He has authored 15 books, five of them on photography and visual design; his most recent, Embracing Creation, was published in conjunction with the opening of his large retrospective exhibition at New Brunswick’s Beaverbrook Art Gallery in September 2013-14.  

Freeman is a recipient of the Order of Canada (1985), the Order of New Brunswick (2013), the National Film Board of Canada’s Gold Medal for Photographic Excellence, the Photographic Society of America’s highest award, The Progress Medal, and is an elected member of the Royal Canadian Academy of Art.

www.freemanpatterson.com 

This competition and its themes invite photographers to showcase their creative skills, using colour as a vibrant medium to capture dynamic, outstanding, stunning, thoughtful and thought-provoking images.  It is an opportunity to explore areas that may stretch your comfort zones, pushing to the boundaries of your creativity.

To keep the focus on the dynamic world of colour, submissions should be limited to colour images only. Black & white, monochrome and infrared images are excluded from this competition. 

The top six scoring images will be submitted as our club’s entry to the CAPA competition on the same topic.

Barbara will share a selection of her photographic series, revealing the images that serve as starting points and tracing how they evolve into finished works.  She'll discuss the techniques she uses-not only to capture her photographs, but also to transform them - demonstrating how she manipulates colour and applies editing methods that are often overlooked in traditional workflows.  Her hope is that you'll leave with fresh ideas and renewed inspiration to explore new ways of photographing and creating your own abstract imagery. 

Barbara's artistic journey began in textile design and weaving.  In 1990, she left that world to explore the computer industry.  While the transition expanded her technical skills, she soon realized how deeply she missed the creative process.  That search eventually led her to abstract photography.  She is a juried member of the Alberta Society of Artists and the Abstract'd Art Collective.  Her work has been exhibited in group shows across Canada, USA, and UK.

https://kreutter.zenfolio.com

https://www.instagram.com/barbkreutter

Photography is a tool to unlock the secret lives of creatures great and small from under the water's surface to the vast expanse of space overhead. From insects to sharks to the milky way, there are mysteries everywhere, with photography opportunities galore. Kristi will describe techniques, from simple to advanced that will help listeners become a stronger photographer, all while connecting deeper with nature.  From basic settings to optimizing your cameras for wildlife photography, she will go through suggestions to help us create more stunning images of wildlife.  

Photos entered in this competition must be taken at night.  There are no subject matter restrictions, as long as it is clear to the viewer that the images were captured at night.  Photos taken in a dark studio or simply featuring a dark background will not be accepted for this competition.

This competition, shared with CAPA,  celebrates the rich diversity of People and Places across our nation. This year, we want to showcase the People who call Canada home, and the varied landscape that surrounds us all.

Landscape –  from the Atlantic coast to the Pacific coast to our Far North, your submitted photographs should showcase our beautiful country and its vast riches of natural and man-made wonders.

People – images of individuals who call Canada home, photographed in their daily activities, street scenes, workplaces, formal settings, community gatherings, and the varied environments where Canadian life unfolds.

The top six scoring images will be submitted as our club’s entry to the CAPA competition on the same topic.

Black and white can offer a classic look for your photographs, but not all images are suited to this kind of treatment. Learn how to choose subjects and compose for black and white, and the best methods for converting RAW files to black and white. We’ll also look into high key and low key work.

Judy Hancock Holland is an award winning Canadian photographic artist and lifelong educator. Her work has been exhibited in North America and Europe, and her YouTube tutorials have garnered over 500,000 views.

http://jhhphoto.com/

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCjuG999_tiydDOSL14uFLTg

Entries must clearly depict intersecting elements. The main area of interest of the photograph must feature the intersection of light, objects, subjects, or a combination thereof creating geometric intersections.  Entires depicting implied or metaphorical intersections will be deemed off-topic and disqualified.

Permitted topics include formal and informal portraits, street photography that singles out individuals or a small group of people and portraits of pets.

Images of wildlife or other animals that are not normally considered to be pets are not allowed. Neither are general street photography scenes where people are not obviously the main area of interest.