With our usual venue unavailable, in May we met at Bilton Methodist Church on Skipton Road. It was certainly warmer than usual and offered us the chance to have tea and coffee (as well as some delicious cakes thanks to president Bex Brown!) during the break, which was a great chance to get to know some new people.
Professional photographer Simon Anderson was our speaker and offered some brilliant advice for anyone wanting to get more out of their pictures.
He clearly knows his stuff and was very enthusiastic when he shared it with us, telling us first about the kind of work he does and what he needs to carry with him when he’s out and about.
He showed us a selection of images which had problems, such as shadows in the wrong places or the subject being too far away, and suggested ways they could be improved. For the more experienced photographers in the group, he had some advice about adjusting camera settings and so on, but for those who were less technically inclined there was plenty he could teach us about setting up photographs and making sure our snaps would really capture what we were seeing or doing. In a lot of cases, simply cutting some of the photograph with a framing device provided by Simon (which looked a lot like a piece of paper cut into a right angle!) made a dramatic improvement.
We were asked to bring along our favourite pictures for Simon to see and two of our members were brave enough to show theirs to the whole group. They were so good, nobody else dared to show theirs! Committee member Hannah Boot had donated a prize for the ‘best in show’ bunting, from her Phoenix Cards stand at the meeting and the winner, Claire Cartledge, chosen by Simon, was suitably impressed.