Val has continued her good form in the Amateur Photographer Of the Year competition this month. This month’s theme was Macro photography. Val’s image of a snowdrop gained 17th place. The judges commented “By using a shallow depth of focus, Val has isolated this single snowdrop”.
Val was also placed in the top 50 in last month’s round on the theme of ‘Shallow Depth of Field’.
Well done Val.
![17.-Val-Lear-331x500[1]](https://www.macclesfieldcameraclub.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/17.-Val-Lear-331x5001.jpg)
More good news for Camera Club members Val Lear and Mark Helliwell who have been awarded an exhibition grant for next years Barnaby festival for their work with a local lady, Rachael.
Rachael is a hoarder who was first diagnosed with OCD some 35 years ago. She recently made contact with Val and Mark through the Camera Club, seeking help from willing photographers to help her construct a record of the process of decluttering the many living spaces in her home. She feels this is vital to her recovery, and hopes that it will lead to her home becoming once again a liveable/navigable space so that some degree of order and contentment will return to her life.
To address the above Val and Mark are designing an exhibition with the aim of :
The photos below shows Rachael watching tennis in her armchair , one of the few spaces available to her. Also, a pile of paper that has been used by Rachael to collect and sort her hair.
Well done Val and Mark a terrific accomplishment , I am sure all the club members will come and support you at the exhibition next June.
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
