Colourful Camera Club

 

Here's the winning entry from the Camera Club's recent competition "Colour", by Angela Bonner.  There were over 60 entries.

(click on the picture to see the whole thing)

The Camera Club is still meeting online for the forseeable future, on Tuesday evenings - their details are on the side bar.

Coming up are presentations on Using Photoshop and Botswana.

Thanks to Peter Seaman, the Chair of the Camera Club, for the information, and the winning photo. 

New Details for the Camera Club

Thanks to Dainis Ozols, of the Hay Camera Club, for the information that the Camera Club website has had a complete re-design, including a new domain! They can now be found at https://www.haycameraclub.com
They've got a full Lockdown programme of online events. On Tuesday 12th May, Peter Wesson will be talking about An African Safari, followed by a short DVD called A Passion for Pastels. It's also the closing date for the competition In My Garden.
The following week has two audio-visual presentations, on Kenya and Kent, and later sessions take members to the Isle of Man, Tuscany and Patagonia. The programme continues until the end of August.

Camera Club

Walking along the Riverside Path yesterday, I met a member of the Camera Club, who told me that they're still managing to meet online - every Tuesday evening up to 25 people log in for a meeting.
They're even having a competition in a couple of weeks - for photos of members' back gardens! Apparently they've been told that, if the garden happens to have a nice view from it, they shouldn't take a photo of the view - it's just for the garden itself.

Camera Club Open Evening

I had a lovely evening at the Camera Club.
I was impressed with how organised they were - everyone was given name badges as they came in. It was also nice to see Sara, who I know from the Baskie and Stitch and Bitch - she'd come along to see if she could get some help with the technical side of photography. She knows how to use a dark room, but computers confuse her! A couple of the members suggested a program called Lightroom (I think), but they also do regular "Ask the Panel" sessions for questions like that. The next one is next week, on January 14th, at the Masonic Hall from 7.30pm.
There's a lot going on - the present programme of events runs until the end of February, with something going on every week. Non-members are charged £5 entry - and there's always home made cake! There are also competitions. I might go back for the Members Night on 4th February, when one of the members is talking about a trip he did around Northern Spain in an old sports car.
Set up in one corner was a laptop showing a slideshow of members' photos on a screen. There was a wide variety, including still life, action shots of surfers, horses galloping through water in the Camargue, Buddhist priests in Nepal, landscapes....
Members come from quite a wide area, too. I met people who had come from Knighton, Llangorse and Talgarth, as well as Hay. And they are interesting people, too - one chap has a daughter who is something important in Twitter, another used to work for Oxfam, and I got into some fascinating conversations, including one about politics in Estonia and Latvia - one of the members has Latvian grandparents. He said his name means "oak tree", apparently a common surname in Latvia.
Another lady (there are a few more men than women in the club at the moment) was also singing the praises of what she called the Walking Wounded walking group. It's a group that meets at the bus shelter in Hay on Mondays at 2pm, for people who have health or mobility problems to have a gentle walk together, and who couldn't manage the route marches that the Hay Walkers go on. Some of them have had strokes, for instance. One of their walks soon will be starting from Llyswen, up a side road that is little used, so they'll be forming a convoy of cars to get there.
In the interests of full disclosure, I have to admit that I was given two After Eight mints when I mentioned I'd be writing about the Camera Club in this blog!

Camera Club

A lovely man came into the shop today to invite me to the first Camera Club meeting of the year. It'll be on Tuesday at 7.30pm at the Masonic Hall, and there will be drinks and nibbles.
I'm considering it - it would be nice to be able to improve my minimal photographic skills.

Children in Need

Pam next door holds a coffee morning for Children in Need every year, just in her kitchen. And if she's still got cake left by lunch time, she goes round the local shops and post office and so on, offering to bring slices in for the staff. This year, she went out to the workmen who were digging up the road just outside. They did make the excuse that they'd just had a big breakfast from the Mixing Bowl, but she took the cake out at lunch time for them instead.
She also had some Christmas cards to sell - a lady she knows had made them, and gave them all to her. They were beautifully done, some with decoupage, and recycling bits of old Christmas cards. If I tried anything like that, it would look as if a nine year old had done it - these looked professional.
Pam is also a member of the Camera Club, so she'd invited them along. There seem to be rumblings of discontent there - one lady said that there were some 'difficult' members - and difficulties with communication over the Christmas dinner. I don't know the people involved, so that's really as much as I gathered from the conversation.
Mrs Williams dropped in from over the road, too. She said she was very glad that their shop was continuing as a butcher's. They didn't really want it to go as anything else. The new people have a 12 month lease, with an option for a further year, at the moment.
The cakes, by the way, were made by Mrs Coles of the WI, and not by Pam, who claims her sponges are like biscuits with jam in the middle!
When I next saw Pam, she said she'd raised £120!