Winner of the 2008, 2011, and 2012 PSA Henricks Award for best newsletter!
Key Events
Sept 4 – Labor Day field trip to Maryland Renaissance Festival (10:00 a.m.)
Sept 7 – Speaker night (7:30 p.m.)
Sept 14 – Competition night: Open Topic (7:30 p.m.)
Sept 21 – Rosh Hashana – No Meeting
Sept 23 – Field Trip to Huntley Meadows Park (10:00 a.m.)
Sept 28 – A Closer Focus meeting (formerly known as Seminar Night) (7:30 p.m.)
Oct 02 – Board Meeting (Monday, 7:00 p.m., Fellowship Hall)
http://www.montgomeryschoolsmd.org/
“Your first 10,000 photographs are your worst”
— Henri Cartier-Bresson
WELCOME BACK FROM OUR NEW PRESIDENT
I hope everyone enjoyed their summer and is ready to participate in our 2017 – 2018 season. The board and chair positions have been working hard this summer to ensure we have a well-planned and full agenda. (read more)
OUR 2017-2018 PROGRAMS
As the dog days of summer draw to a close, our thoughts move toward cooler times and, at last, the reconvening of camera club. Our Thursday nights will soon be filled with provocative speakers, competitions of our best shots ever, and thought-provoking seminar nights. Let’s not forget the field trips that take us to challenging destinations. Is this not a photographer’s dream?
It all begins on September 7, opening night of our 2017-18 season. As in the past, we will have speakers the first Thursday night of the month, judged competitions the second, and in-depth subject investigations the third.
Our thought was to present speakers on the year’s competition topics – nature, low light, Washington DC, architecture, and monochrome – a month or more in advance of the event. This would allow members time to apply what they learn in preparing for the subject competitions. We will also hear from speakers on other subjects such as travel and turning a photo into art.
Our upcoming judges have seen our website and know what to expect: some of the best images they have ever seen from a camera club. They are ready to share their expertise on the competition subjects they will be critiquing.
We are all very excited about seeing each other again and catching up on our summer adventures. If your summer was exciting, this season’s speakers and judges will keep that excitement going.
– Renee Schaefer
Program Chair
IRENE HINKE-SACILOTTO TO BE OUR SEPTEMBER SPEAKER
The 2017-2018 SSCC season opens on September 7 with guest speaker Irene Hinke-Sacilotto presenting “A Visual Journey into Brazil’s Pantanal”.
The Pantanal is the world’s largest seasonally flooded inland tropical wetland. (read more)
COMPETITION COLUMN
Hi to all SSCC members. I’m very excited about the upcoming Competitions season. The competitions, held the second Thursday of each month, provide a great opportunity to share your images with fellow members and have them critiqued by professional photographers. Though their judgments about the images and their selection of winning photos are necessarily subjective, the judges invariably offer helpful insights and suggestions about the entered images, whether they’re yours or those of another member. In my 2+ years as a SSCC member, I have yet to leave a competition without having picked up something useful that I can incorporate into my photography.
For the new Competitions season, we have what I believe will be a fun, stimulating and diverse array of competition topics. Our repeating mainstays – Open, Nature and Monochrome, will be joined by three new topics – Architectural Photography, Low Light Photography and Anything Washington. Please refer to the Members Handbook and/or the Cable Release for the definition of each topic.
Here’s the schedule for the season:
- September – Open
- October – Nature Photography
- November – Open
- December – Low Light Photography
- January – Open
- February – Anything Washington DC
- March – Open
- April – Architecture Photography
- May – Monochrome Photography
- June – End of Year Competition (special rules apply)
As indicated, the topic for the season’s first competition on September 14th is Open, which gives you full freedom to enter images on any topic (or no topic) that you choose. The only requirement is that original images must be created by a light sensitive device, like a camera or scanner. Any subsequent alterations or manipulations of the images are permissible, so have at it.
Please be mindful that electronic submissions for projected images must be received no later than 11:59 pm, September 7th. The images should be emailed to: SSCCphotography@yahoo.com. (One important detail – In order to participate in the September competition, you must pay the club’s annual dues before the start of the competition.)
To learn the nitty gritty about the competitions, please refer to the Competition Rules and the Members Handbook, both of which are accessible from the SSCC website. Of course, if you have any questions about the competitions, please feel free to contact me at competition@ssccphotography.org
Finally, our monthly competitions are meant to be engaging, interactive member events, rather than dry, impersonal contests. As such, we heartily encourage all members who submit photo entries, whether print or electronic, to be present at the competitions. I say this for several reasons.
First, the critiques the judges offer of the photo entries can be valuable for the creators of the images. After all, the SSCC enlists our judges not only to have them select their favorite images for ribbons but, as importantly, to offer their professional photographic expertise and insights as they evaluate the images.
Second, audience members really appreciate hearing from ribbon winners a little of the contextual history of their images. Knowing where an image was made or how it was processed can be informative and often entertaining.
And Third, being able to personally congratulate award winners makes for a more vibrant, fun experience for the audience. If a ribbon winner is absent when his or her name is called, the enthusiasm the audience wants to convey to the winner is unavoidably diminished. So, for all these reasons; if you plan to enter an image in a competition this season, please try your best to attend the event. It really helps strengthen the ties that bind us together as the SSCC.
As always, if you have any questions about the competitions, please feel free to contact Larry Gold at competition@ssccphotography.org.
STEVE GOTTLIEB IS OUR SEPTEMBER OPEN JUDGE
Steve Gottlieb is the photographer and author of multiple widely acclaimed books. Literally thousands of his photographs from his books and commercial and editorial assignments have been published worldwide. (read more)
A CLOSER FOCUS MEETING (THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 28)
You might have noticed this odd new name for a meeting, and why is it on the fourth Thursday of the month, normally reserved for a Board meeting?
The Board decided that our third meeting of the month, previously known as Seminar Night, did not have a name that captured the range of activities we enjoy in that meeting. We decided that a new name, A Closer Focus, would be better – indicating that this meeting would cover photographic topics in some depth while being open as to the type of activity. This evening continues to include education, hands-on workshops, and open forum discussions, how-to presentations, book reviews, video presentations, and more.
Normally, this meeting is on the third Thursday of the month, but Thursday, September 21, lands on Rosh Hashana. We are postponing A Closer Focus one week for just this month to occur on September 28, and rescheduling our Board meeting. Our closer focus will be on the following subjects this month:
Worldwide almost 5 billion people use smartphones among a population close to 7.5 billion. Conservative estimates are that about 1.1 trillion photos will be taken in 2017 with those mobile phones. Last year 98.4% of consumer cameras sold were built in to a mobile phone, the rest of the sales were compacts, mirrorless and DSLR cameras. Because of mobile device cameras photography and picture taking are more popular than ever before in history.
Why all the excitement and move towards mobile? That’s the question we’ll attempt to answer during Closer Focus night. We’ll discuss motivations and rewards of taking pictures with a mobile phone, favorite camera and editing apps and ways to get better with your mobile photography.
We have a project for this meeting as well. “Seeing” will be the theme for the first few projects of the year. For the A Closer Focus meeting in September we will make the photos to build a single 180 degrees panoramic image, and discuss how to set up to accomplish a panorama, and how to execute the final product.
Please bring your camera, a tripod, and a “medium” focal length lens or medium zoom. You don’t want to use a wide angle or long telephoto lens for this project. In October you will bring the photos in, and show them all stitched together as a single panoramic image.
As a preview, the next project, in November, will be to take pictures on your stomach and bring about 6 different images.
In addition we will have the usual open discussion of book reports, gallery reviews, equipment and software discussions, or any photo related topic on your mind.
SEPTEMBER 4 FIELD TRIP TO THE MARYLAND RENAISSANCE FESTIVAL
On Labor Day, Monday, September 4, we will go to the Maryland Renaissance Festival. You will have an opportunity to shoot hundreds of people in weird medieval costumes, all of whom love to have their pictures taken; jousting, archery, jugglers, street entertainment, Shakespeare type stage productions, and general bacchanalia. (read more)
SEPTEMBER 23 FIELD TRIP TO HUNTLEY MEADOWS PARK
On Saturday, September 23, we will go to Huntley Meadows Park. Nestled in Fairfax County’s Hybla Valley, Huntley Meadows Park is a rich, natural and historical island of over 1,500 acres in the suburban sea of Northern Virginia. It harbors a nationally significant historic house, majestic forests, wildflower-speckled meadows and vast wetlands bursting with life. (read more)
♦ CLUB NEWS ♦
MEMBERSHIP UPDATE
We are very pleased to welcome all of our members back for the 2017/2018 season of the Silver Spring Camera Club! We hope that everyone had a lovely, photo-filled summer. We are all very excited to see your photos, and look forward to your participating in the varied and rich programming that is planned for this season.
We would like to welcome two new members who joined over the summer: Michelle Weakley and Lwenyi Nkonko. We look forward to meeting and getting to know both Michelle and Lwenyi in person, and to viewing their photos!
We would also like to thank all of the members who have rejoined for the upcoming season. For those of you who have not renewed your membership, Sue Green and I (Wendy Kates) will bring extra membership forms to our meetings in September and October to make it a little easier for you to renew. We would appreciate it if everyone completed a membership form to ensure that we have the most up-to-date contact information for you. Also, please be sure to include your interests in serving on committees, and any new ideas for programming that you might have.
We hope to see all of you in September!
END OF YEAR CELEBRATION – JUNE 8, 2017
The End of Year Celebration on June 8 was a great success! We had a potluck dinner at our regular meeting location in Fellowship Hall, mingled, and then handed out awards to recognize the year’s outstanding photographers. Many attendees won terrific raffle prizes! The relaxed atmosphere and easy circulation through the large space allowed members to socialize. Here are a number of photos from our celebration, thanks to Andrew Rein and Sue Green:
