In the Herald - Looking at diverse fields of photography

Another great article in this weeks Irvine Herald... Many thanks to all the photographers, Clive Watkins for his report, and The Irvine Herald for putting it all together.....(click on images below to view full screen).

For this week’s Irvine Camera Club virtual Zoom we opened up our meeting to questions from the members. Our club is primarily based on the sharing of knowledge and experience to improve each other’s photography. This isn’t just about understanding how our cameras work and how to use Photoshop, but also why it is that we take photographs and what it is that makes an image successful.

Having said that, the one thing that still gets most questions from beginners and experienced photographers alike, is the area of post-processing. There appears to be a real desire to be able to do all the really cool stuff in Photoshop such as replacing boring skies with interesting ones, and adding elements into a scene that weren’t really there. Working through a few images online was a great way to show people how easy it is to do some of these things and hopefully inspired a few of the group to give it a go for themselves.

We also spoke at length about how to manage a large catalogue of images so that you can locate a photograph maybe many months, or even years, after you originally took it. Coupled with image management is the perennial subject of backing up. Keeping safe copies of your digital images is more important than ever. We discussed various ways of ensuring that we are all able to recover our photographs when the inevitable happens and our computer fails or the hard-disk crashes. Fortunately, “the cloud” makes it easier and faster than ever to create secure copies of our precious images without costing a fortune.

This week we are featuring a selection of our photographs taken over the last three months for the various challenges that have been set. We hope you enjoy them!

As lockdown restrictions begin to be lifted, we hope that we will very soon be able to meet outside for a photographic field trip where we will be able to put some of what we have learned during lockdown into practice. Until then we will continue to meet every week online. Anyone with an interest in photography is welcome to join us. Please see our website www.irvinecc.co.uk for more information.