The Keith Hunt Trophy will be on Saturday, 11 November 2011, at Trinity Methodist Church, Brewery Road, Woking. The judge is still to be confirmed.
The Surrey Advertiser Rosebowl will be on Saturday, 25 February 2012, at Parkview Centre for the Community, Sheerwater, Woking. Judge will be David Eastley, LRPS.
We will be sending entry forms to all those who took part in the competitions last year about 2 months ahead of the competition date. If your club did not take part, please contact me and I will make sure you get one.
Saturday, 27 August 2011
Tuesday, 23 August 2011
Light-field photography has the potential to revolutionize photography. Ren Ng, the founder of Lytro, explains how a camera can capture images that are never out of focus
Lytro has big plans. This week the Mountain View, CA-based startup said it would soon bring to market a new kind of camera that's based on light-field photography. The result: photographs that you can focus after you take them. Simply click your mouse on the spot on the picture you want in focus, and it changes before your eyes
Article including demo also see this video from the BBC
YouTube video promo
Article including demo also see this video from the BBC
YouTube video promo
Friday, 19 August 2011
World Photography Day
World Photography Day?
Many people that have mentioned that they’ve never heard of World Photography Day. Why is that? World Photography Day wasn’t ‘created’ by a big brand as a marketing tool. Rather, it’s a day where photographers had started to come together to celebrate photography, just because they could. Any excuse to throw a party right?
Slowly, groups around the world have started to get on board with the idea of World Photography Day and you will find traces of World Photography Day being celebrated over the last 20 years or so. Each year, World Photography Day has gained momentum and this year, we’re hoping to bring photographers together once again with an even larger audience.
Why August 19th?
World Photography Day originates from the invention of the Daguerreotype, a photographic processes developed by Louis Daguerre. On January 9, 1839, The French Academy of Sciences announced the daguerreotype process. A few months later, on August 19, 1839, the French government announced the invention as a gift “Free to the World.”
Another photographic processes, the Calotype, was also invented in 1839 by William Fox Talbot (it was announced in 1841). Together, the invention of both the Daguerreotype and Calotype mark 1839 as the year that photography was invented.
If you’re interested in learning more about the history of photography, take a look at the following article on Wikipedia: History of Photography
Monday, 25 July 2011
Photographer Nan Goldin's best shots 'I let the children be themselves, and try to find out who they are'
From the Guardian
"I don't photograph adults so much any more. I don't have a child and, psychologically, my focus on them is a lot about me wishing that I did. But I am a godmother to friends' children around the world – in Berlin, New York, Sweden and Italy. I don't remember much ever feeling like a child, so maybe photographing them triggers memories. They are wild and magical, as if from another planet. And they haven't been socially conditioned yet, so they can scream and express how they feel publicly. Sometimes I envy them. When I am in a group of people, the children and I find each other's eyes, and end up laughing at the same, unspoken thing.
I've been taking pictures of children since the early 1980s, and it's become increasingly important to me. I see a continuum in the children of my friends, some of whom have died. It's about hoping that my friends will bring up a new species of people.
Slideshows are my most important medium; they are like films that can constantly be edited. They always grow, as I show them over a period of years. These pictures are from the second version of a slideshow that was first shown last year in Athens. The images are edited and timed to a soundtrack. The music came first: all the songs are sung by children except the first, which is about pregnancy.
This is one of my most optimistic works: not concentrated on loss, death or darkness. With other pieces, I have wanted people to faint, throw up or cry. I've also wanted to touch them and make them laugh. Here, I don't want people to faint or throw up. But I do want them to take away something about this puritanical new witch hunt over children and their sexuality. Everybody came out of the body of a woman, and that should not be forgotten, or be frightening. It amazes me that there's a controversy over public breastfeeding, that it can be considered disgusting. Or over children running around naked, especially in the US. Children shouldn't be afraid of their own bodies; it's the worst thing you can do to a human being.
Continues
"I don't photograph adults so much any more. I don't have a child and, psychologically, my focus on them is a lot about me wishing that I did. But I am a godmother to friends' children around the world – in Berlin, New York, Sweden and Italy. I don't remember much ever feeling like a child, so maybe photographing them triggers memories. They are wild and magical, as if from another planet. And they haven't been socially conditioned yet, so they can scream and express how they feel publicly. Sometimes I envy them. When I am in a group of people, the children and I find each other's eyes, and end up laughing at the same, unspoken thing.
I've been taking pictures of children since the early 1980s, and it's become increasingly important to me. I see a continuum in the children of my friends, some of whom have died. It's about hoping that my friends will bring up a new species of people.
Slideshows are my most important medium; they are like films that can constantly be edited. They always grow, as I show them over a period of years. These pictures are from the second version of a slideshow that was first shown last year in Athens. The images are edited and timed to a soundtrack. The music came first: all the songs are sung by children except the first, which is about pregnancy.
This is one of my most optimistic works: not concentrated on loss, death or darkness. With other pieces, I have wanted people to faint, throw up or cry. I've also wanted to touch them and make them laugh. Here, I don't want people to faint or throw up. But I do want them to take away something about this puritanical new witch hunt over children and their sexuality. Everybody came out of the body of a woman, and that should not be forgotten, or be frightening. It amazes me that there's a controversy over public breastfeeding, that it can be considered disgusting. Or over children running around naked, especially in the US. Children shouldn't be afraid of their own bodies; it's the worst thing you can do to a human being.
Continues
Friday, 22 July 2011
Adobe releases lengthy list of Apple Lion woes
From the Register
Not that this last bit is any great surprise. As Leopard and Snow Leopard users will tell you, Adobe software such as Photoshop never did play well with those operating systems' virtual-desktop feature, Spaces. There's apparently some under-the-hood incompatibilities with Adobe's window handling and Mac OS X.
As with all operating system upgrades, incompatibilities arise with previously trusted apps – especially apps with ancient chunks of code still lurking inside, such as Photoshop and other Adobe offerings
One day after Apple's Mac OS X Lion was released into the wild, Steve Jobs' bête noire, Adobe, has released an extensive list of wounds that the big cat has clawed into its products.
The appropriately titled "Known Issues with Adobe products on Mac OS 10.7 Lion" is a 1,500-word litany of woe, listing Lion-caused problems in 19 Adobe apps, and calling out some non-app-specific basics such as the need to install your own Java runtime and how to find your username/Library folder, which Apple has chosen to disappear.
Problematic apps include such stalwarts as Photoshop CS3, CS4, and CS5; Dreamweaver CS4, and Illustrator CS5 and CS5.1. Problems range from mild, such as multiple keychain entries for Dreamweaver CS4, to fatal flaws for some features, such as the disabling of Droplets in Photoshop.
Problematic apps include such stalwarts as Photoshop CS3, CS4, and CS5; Dreamweaver CS4, and Illustrator CS5 and CS5.1. Problems range from mild, such as multiple keychain entries for Dreamweaver CS4, to fatal flaws for some features, such as the disabling of Droplets in Photoshop.
Droplet death – which is fixable in Photoshop CS5 through an update, but not so in CS3 or CS4 – is due to the fact that Lion no longer includes nor supports Rosetta, the dynamic code-translation tech that let old PowerPC code run on Intel-based Macs. The code that enabled Droplets, it seems, was written for PowerPC, and was upgraded only for CS5.
Adobe also notes that one of Lion's marquee features, the System Preference that allows you to have Lion restore an app's windows just as they were when you quit that app, doesn't work at all in Adobe products. "This feature requires new code in order to work properly," they note. "Adobe will research adding this functionality for inclusion in future versions of our products."
Not that this last bit is any great surprise. As Leopard and Snow Leopard users will tell you, Adobe software such as Photoshop never did play well with those operating systems' virtual-desktop feature, Spaces. There's apparently some under-the-hood incompatibilities with Adobe's window handling and Mac OS X.
As with all operating system upgrades, incompatibilities arise with previously trusted apps – especially apps with ancient chunks of code still lurking inside, such as Photoshop and other Adobe offerings
Tuesday, 19 July 2011
V&A to open new photograph gallery
The V&A museum is to open a new photograph gallery in the autumn to showcase its extensive collection.
The permanent gallery will launch with an exhibition of works by the likes of Henri Cartier-Bresson, Man Ray, Diane Arbus and Irving Penn.
The gallery will chronicle the history of photography from its invention in 1839 up to the 1960s.
An image of Parliament Street in London, the V&A's oldest photograph, will also be housed in the new space.
Other works include Curtis Moffat's "camera-less" photograph of a dragonfly - created without the use of a camera around 1925 - and a 1957 scientific photograph of a coronet formed by a single drop of milk falling into liquid.
The display will be re-curated every 18 months. Temporary displays of more contemporary works will be shown in the Victoria and Albert's existing photo galleries.
There will also be two 'In Focus' sections, each featuring a photographer represented in the V&A collection.
The first will be dedicated to British photographer Julia Margaret Cameron, and the second to Cartier-Bresson.
The new gallery will open on 25 October at the museum, based in London's South Kensington.
Founded in 1852, the V&A was the first museum to collect photographs and the first to exhibit them.
BBC report
V&A Photography web site
Wednesday, 13 July 2011
All life on a bench
An experiment in street photography. I just sat on the edge of the fountain in Trafalgar Square and took these photographs of people using a bench about 50 metres away
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