News items
The Internal Competition rules have now been updated and can be viewed under the ‘Images and Competitions’ tab.
There is also additional info under ‘This Seasons Competitions’ about the judging method of each competition and, where appropriate, the name of the external judge.
You have to be in it to win it, as the saying goes: although he didn’t win, Brian Law did get a commended in this year’s Stefan Buczacki Photography Competition and two complementary tickets to the Southport Show. This flower photography competition is a regular part of the annual Southport Flower Show. The competition had 4 sections: British Plant Portraits, British Garden Views, British Natural History and Wildlife, all of which were print classes, and a digital class, British Garden/Plant related. Brian said he took the easy option and entered the two permitted images into the digital class the poppy bud image, below, got the commended award.
The subject matter for this image came from his garden and was the result of an accident when he knocked the unopened bud off the plant with a lawn mower when cutting the grass. Brian took this unopened bud into the house left it on the sideboard for a couple of days and took a few shots of it as it gradually unfurled. He used a sheet of white mount board as the background and available light from the window with the camera tripod mounted. The image was processed with Nik Color Effex Pro.
A photograph of the Orion Nebula and the neighbouring Running Man Nebula taken by longstanding Macclesfield Camera Club member David Tolliday has been shortlisted for The Sir Patrick Moore Prize for Best Newcomer in the Astronomy Photographer of the Year 2015 competition organised by the Royal Observatory Greenwich. The results will be announced at an awards ceremony on 17 September 2015 and the image will be included in a book of award winning and shortlisted images. The image was taken during David’s first serious attempt at astrophotography from a dark sky site in Mid Wales in November 2014 using a Canon 5D MkIII camera and 500mm lens set on an Astrotrac borrowed from fellow Camera Club member Kevin Blake (Thank you Kevin). The time was well after midnight, the temperature was below freezing and there was ice on the tripod and frost covered the camera bag.
The image is a stack of five separate exposures taken at different settings ranging from 5 to 180 seconds at f4 to record detail the different parts of the nebula which have very different brightness levels. The images were edited and combined in Photoshop.
David Tolliday’s Orion Nebula and the neighbouring Running Man Nebula
The summer will soon be over and the forthcoming season will see some changes to our internal competitions . Many clubs have already moved away from the scoring of every image, towards a more critique-based affair and so we are going to be experimenting with a new approach and also trialling some alternative judging methods.
Due to the decline in print entries, five of the six competitions will be digital-only and one will be print-only. A print-themed evening will be held ahead of this to offer advice and practical know-how on all aspects of producing a mounted print. All members who wish to enter will also be able to purchase mount boards from the club at a nominal charge. The aim of this is to encourage more entries so that hopefully, a print section for each competition may be re-introduced at a later date. Also, of course, prints are essential for the continued success of our annual exhibition.
The rules for competition entry are otherwise largely unchanged (the detailed instructions on this will be updated in due course). In summary, the judge or judges will be asked to critique all images then select a winner and 9 other commended images. These will then be scored from 10 down to 1 for the purposes of our league table.
In terms of judging, two competitions will still be scored by external judges and one (Landscape) will be judged by our own Mark Helliwell. The other two will be scored by club members – one by a selected panel and the other by all members attending the competition evening. The exact format of these competitions will be described nearer the time but they will also involve feedback/critique of all images. It will be interesting to see how this approach compares to the external judging we are all used to and hopefully will invite much discussion on how we run future competitions.
As always, looking forward to seeing some wonderful competition entries!
A small group of Camera Club car enthusiasts headed out to the Vintage Car Racing at the Oulton Park circuit yesterday. Lucky again with the weather and light, giving almost perfect photography conditions, helped by the fact that these cars are good pace slower than the modern F1 variety.
Oulton Park is a great circuit for photography, lots of different vantage points without having to shoot through wire fencing. We left Macc at 8.15am to drive the 30 miles or so to the circuit and arrived in time for the morning practice session, we also met up with Matt Eagles an ex-camera club member who now lives near to the circuit. We used this morning session to walk the circuit and see where the best points were to photograph the actual racing which started after lunch at 12.45pm. We were also able to walk the paddock and get close up photos of the cars , their engines being work on and chat to the owners, all very friendly stuff. There were 10 races which gave ample opportunity to get some shots and to practice with slower shutter speeds, panning and varying angles. It needed around 125th second to get good panning shots whilst handholding lenses up to 400mm. We got plenty of single car shots but the best are the actual racing shots with four or five cars battling it out for position.
Steve Gresty, David Tolliday, Conor Molloy and Matt Eagles.
Vintage racing cars in the heat of battle
Vintage Racing cars at Oulton Park
