Cable Release

SSCC publishes a monthly newsletter, the Cable Release, from September to May each year. This award-winning 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 moved to a landscape format to better accommodate the computer and tablet screens that most members are using.  Computers offer other advantages as well, and to take advantage of them the Cable Release has changed again to become a web-based newsletter.   We will no longer publish a PDF version, although we will maintain an archive of the prior newsletters.

This new format has a number of significant advantages over the previous hardcopy-emulating format when read with a digital device. One of these is much more efficient browsing, more selectivity in finding what you want to read, and picking the order of when you want to read it.

You will open the month’s Cable Release on 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 moving out of the newsletter and into the main website for the club (and this Handbook). What remains in the Cable Release is new material, results of the prior month’s competitions, and other items befitting a “newsletter.” You will see introductory paragraphs on the primary page leading into full articles ton their own page, and these are opened with an easy mouse click. You can 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. We will be doing both, depending on the subject. Think about this freedom when contemplating submitting a multi-image equipment review or tips and techniques, for example.

The newsletter can only be as good as the articles and information submitted by the Club members. In a recent survey, one of the things that people asked for was more equipment reviews. Please consider offering short reviews of your own equipment. This could be a new lens or an old favorite that might still be available on eBay or other used equipment venues. Consider your preferences in camera types as well. Many people wonder about the value of micro 4/3 cameras versus full-frame DSLRs, for example.  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 an 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. Let’s focus just on the positive experiences that you’d recommend to others.

All members have the opportunity to submit pieces for the Cable Release for publication. If you want to submit something, please help me get it into the CR by following these guidelines:

(1) Please proofread your submission carefully.

(2) Keep the formatting to a minimum, as I will have to reformat everything to post online.  (I have a couple of header fonts, one text font, plus bold, italics, and underline available – that’s all)

(3) If you want to use pictures and have them appear in a defined order and place, use brackets and identifying labels in the text to indicate their location. I can also include a larger group of photos as a gallery. Also, please provide short captions for them in you want captions – you can put these inside the brackets in quotes to associate them with the photo. You can do something similar for a gallery list – indicate Gallery in the text.

(4) Keep the file size for pictures below 1000 kb.

I look forward to another great year for the Cable Release, and I am eager to get your contributions!

As this is my first year as Cable Release editor and this is our first move to a web-based platform,  I welcome all feedback and critiques.

Your editor,

Dennis Freeman