Partial Solar Eclipse

There will be a partial solar eclipse on the morning of 26 January 2009 lasting from around 07:00 to around 09:30.

From Solar Eclipse on 26 January: Astronomy 2009

Eclipse Viewing in Cape Town

On the morning, from 7 a.m., the Iziko Planetarium Cape Town will be setting up in the Museum Amphitheatre (in front of the South African Museum in the Company’s Gardens) to view the eclipse.

Telescope(s) will be set up, a number of free viewers and handouts explaining the phenomena will be available for the public.

As demand warrants, short planetarium shows will be run to illustrate what exactly is taking place and the difference between full, partial and annular eclipses.

More information, including the map below, can be found on the Johannesburg Planetarium’s site.

Partial solar eclipse 26 January 2009

Report January Meeting 14.01.09

A great crowd of over 50 members arrived at the meeting last night – quite a few new faces, as well as some we hadn’t seen for some time.  We welcomed several guests, as well as Francine, a lecturer at the Stellenbosch Academy of Design and Photography, who was our judge for the evening.

Of course, one of the most important ‘notices’ was to say Thank You to Steve for setting up our brilliant website –  the round of applause from the audience was well deserved.

Eric Palmer has offered to organise an outing involving some of his off-road mountain biking friends, at a venue where members can photograph them doing all manner of tricks – speeding, jumping, flying (and no doubt, falling down …).  Members will be advised via this website as to when exactly this outing is going to happen.  Paddy is busy organising the February outing – watch this space.

The Competition ‘Silhouette’ and the Open Sections in both Prints and Projected Images were both well-subscribed … there were several ‘first timers’ included, which is heartening – perhaps our ‘Get your Feet Wet’ project is paying off.  Francine got through the judging very efficiently – thanks also to Ilse and Steve for their administrative flair. Steve will soon be placing the competition results on the website.

The break for tea allowed for some busy social interaction, after which Chris Joubert presented ‘The People of Lubumbashi’ – a photographic project which he hopes to self-publish and get printed, in order to enlighten the general public of the dire circumstances in which the poorer people of Lubumbshi live.  His portrait work was excellent, and his street photography highlighted the difficult circumstances that many of the people live in.  We wish him well in his venture, and thank him for his presentation.

My thanks to the many members who helped out with the tea and kitchen duties, as well as the committee members for the ‘setting up’ and ‘taking down’ before and after the meeting.

Next month’s meeting is going to be an Evaluation one, together with Hermanus, who will be our guests.  Watch the website for more details!

Nettie

Competition entries from my perspective

Some feedback on the new submission procedures now that the entry deadline has passed.

In general most people took heed of the guidelines and submitted correctly sized images to the correct address. There were however a few people that sent their submissions to the wrong address or submitted images that were considerably larger than they should have been.  The good news is that as this is the first month that we have a web site and are trying to tighten up on the rules, I have cut people some slack and not rejected anyone’s submissions. The bad news is that this is the last month that I will be doing so.

You might be wondering what it looks like when I receive your submissions.  I receive them to a Gmail account and use a web-based e-mail client to read the e-mails. This allows me to see the size of the images before I download them, meaning I can now easily reject over-sized entries before I waste bandwidth downloading them. Below is a screenshot of one of the entries I received this month with annotations indicating how I can tell that the images are too large

I know that it is sometimes difficult to get your file small enough without reducing the quality too much so I am happy to give a little bit of leeway but files that are 3 or 11 times as large as they should be are unacceptable and will be rejected in future and you will be disappointed to sit through the competition, only to realise that one or more of your entries was not accepted.

PHOTOGRAPHING THE SACRED LOTUSES IN STELLENBOSCH Guest Article by Ilse Andrag

Apart from there being a veritable plethora of image subjects in this garden, the lotus flowers in the little pond next to the hothouses provide a soothing and joyful focus point at this time of the year. On 7 Jan. Nettie and I left a windy, cloudy Cape Town hopefully, and we were quite surprised to find Stellenbosch under a clear sky! 

This is the oldest university botanical garden in South Africa – and beautifully maintained. The gardens include three glass houses (tropical-, succulent- and karoo houses), the lotus lily pond, water lily pond, Japanese garden, herb garden and arboretum. There is also the BioBou Garden Gift Shop (only indigenous, plant-based, organic and eco-friendly products). The garden is open 8-5, seven days a week, closed only on certain public holidays.  Call 021 808 3054 for information on how many lotuses are in bloom.

The earlier you go the better, for photographing bright flowers in full sun is not the easiest of tasks (at about 10.00 the sun shines on most of the lilies). Be sure to take sunscreen and a hat! Apart from these supermodel lilies, you will also find insects galore to photograph, so don’t leave your long lens at home: dragonflies, spiders, nectar-seeking goggos..

The Katjiepiering Tea Garden in the dense shade of the huge oaks could provide whatever sustenance you need during your stay.

If you don’t want to travel so far, and live in Cape Town, you will find sacred lotuses in the bottom-most pond of Wynberg Park, but these lotuses are not as accessible as the ones in Stellenbosch.  It is a natural, wild pond, not a brick built pond with lilies hanging over its sides. The choice is yours.

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