2009 January – Competition Winners

Here are the winners of the January competition for which the set subject was Silhouette.

Please note that only digital images are available for display.

Prints

Set Subject

  1. Silhouette in the Storm
    Bernard Seymour-Hall
  2. Come On, Hurry Up
    JJ van Heerden
  3. Sunset at Signal Hill
    Neels Beyers

Open

  1. Slow Currents
    Paul Hayes-Gregson
  2. Overberg Waterfall
    Nettie Warncke
  3. Sunset at Signal Hill
    Neels Beyers

Projected Images

Set Subject

  1. Bubble Silhouette
    Michele Moss
  2. Snow Silhouette
    Bernard Seymour-Hall
  3. Richtersveld
    JJ van Heerden

1. Bubble Silhouette2. Snow Silhouette3. Richtersveld

Open

  1. Eaten Away By Wind
    Neels Beyers
  2. Ascent
    Irmel Dunaiski
  3. Reflections on Foil
    Kerry Jones

1. Eaten Away By Wind2. Ascent

Genius Of Photography Series

Genius Of Photography Series | PixSylated

This month’s “Best Web Video” is actually an entire series — the Genius Of Photography produced by the BBC (site here). If you are trying to figure out how to be a photographer today, I think it’s essential to expose yourself (pun intended) to a bit of the 170 years of our collective history. Consider this 6-part series to be a must watch.

Outside the UK, the Genius Of Photography appears periodically on Ovation (USA), ABC (Australia), Knowledge Network (Canada) and elsewhere. Fortunately for the impatient and impulsive, the entire series has been posted on YouTube in 10 minute installments. To make things easy, I’ve collected all 37 links below.

Enjoy. Learn. Pass it on.

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.