SSCC publishes a monthly newsletter, the Cable Release, from September to May each year. This publication keeps members informed about Club events, offers member-written articles about a variety of photography-related topics, and includes news about seminars, workshops, and exhibits to further members’ photographic education. Each Cable Release issue also features winners from the previous month’s photo competition – both projected and printed entries. The Photographic Society of America awarded the Cable Release second place (tie) for large club newsletters in 2013-2014 and even the newsletter-of-the-year in previous rounds of competition.
Last year the Cable Release became a web-based newsletter. We maintain an archive of the prior newsletters in the newer web-based and the original pdf formats.
The newer format has a number of significant advantages over the previous hardcopy-emulating format when read with a digital device. These include more efficient browsing, more selectivity in reading one particular article at a time, and ease of picking the order of the various articles. We also can provide links to other articles, from within the SSCC and throughout the internet at large, for further exploration of topics of interest.
The Cable Release is organized from a high-level page that provides key events, dates, and topics at a glance. Information that rarely changes, such as the membership application, SSCC Officers and Chairs, and Competition Guidelines are located via the main website for the Club (and this Handbook). The Cable Release contains mostly new material, results of the prior month’s competitions, and other items befitting a “newsletter.” You will generally see introductory paragraphs on the primary page linked to full articles on their own pages. You can more quickly navigate to topics of interest without paging and re-paging through a serial magazine format.
Another big advantage is that we have removed the size constraint for articles (for the most part). While we still want to keep each articles concise and readable in a few minutes, we can now include galleries of pictures for an article rather than just a few selected photographs.
The newsletter can only be as good as the articles and information submitted by the Club members. Please consider offering reviews of your own photographic equipment or software. This could be a new acquisition or an old favorite that might still be available on eBay or other used equipment venues. People are also looking for photo tips and techniques, so please send me any that you might have. The web-based Cable Release is an opportunity to share your thoughts in a flexible format with illustrative examples.
If you’ve attended photo workshops, seminars, or classes that others could also be interested in, please send me a short review. I’m not necessarily looking for a full-length article. It can be a paragraph – please include a web address or equivalent for the organization involved so that the members know where to pursue it further. Try to focus more on the positive experiences that you’d recommend to others.
All members have the opportunity to submit content for Cable Release publication. If you want to submit something, please help me by following these guidelines:
- Please proofread your submission carefully.
- Keep the formatting to a minimum, as I will have to reformat everything to put it online. (I have a few header fonts, one text font, plus bold, italics, color, and underline available – that’s all). If you would like to do something more elaborate, I can consider converting your original into a picture format, and embed the picture in the Cable Release.
- If you want to use photographs, and have them appear in a defined order and place, use identifying labels in the text to indicate to me their location. I can also include a larger group of photos as a gallery. Also, please provide short captions for photos if you want captions.
- Keep the file size for each photograph below 1000 kb – I will reduce a larger photo below this limit for you if you send something bigger.
I look forward to another great year for the Cable Release, and I am eager to get your contributions!
I welcome all feedback and critiques.
Your editor,
Dennis Freeman