Dave Coates                                 http://www.davecoatesphotography.dsl.pipex.com/                                        Colour slide show and about 25 prints

Sandy Furniss
http://www.teesdpg.co.uk/gallery/sf%20gallery/sf%20frameset.php
A slide show in 3 sections, nature, landscape and creative. It will be technically orientated but suitable for all levels from beginners to advanced.

The club will be holding its biennial exhibition of members’ prints at the Visitor Centre Sutton Bank between June 12th and 20th 2010. This provides all members with the opportunity to display a selection of their work and it is hoped that every club member will submit a maximum of three prints into the exhibition. There is no ‘selection or judging’ of images; subject to the availability of display space all prints submitted will be displayed.

The only criteria for submission is that the prints must be mounted on mount board sized at 500mm x 400mm. Due to the dimensions of the display stands available at the visitor centre we have found it possible to display more images if prints are mounted in ‘Vertical format’.

There is no restriction on the size of the print itself provided it can be mounted within the 500mm x 400mm mount board. For this reason those who chose to crop their image into a square or ’landscape’ format may nevertheless wish to consider, if appropriate to their work, mounting the print on a ‘Vertical’ mount board.

For those who have not previously had the opportunity to mount prints, the club will be holding a ‘print mounting session’ (most probably at Wrelton village hall) on a date to be arranged.

Alan Clark, with the assistance of others, will be organising the exhibition and he has asked that submissions be handed in to him by 3rd JUNE at the very the latest. The submissions have to be labelled and prepared for the display stands and this is quite a lengthy task. To assist in this process members are asked to write their name and the title of the image on the rear of the mount board and to submit them, together with an ‘authors submission form’, on or before the club meeting on the 3rd June. Download submission form.

We hope, as in previous years, that members will offer their assistance by giving a little time to help supervise the exhibition.

If the idea of AV interests you, then there are two upcoming events that are really worth attending.  Firstly, the next RPS Great Yorkshire AV Sunday is being held at the National Media Museum in Bradford on Sunday, 21^st February, starting at 11am.  The morning session will feature attendees sequences, followed after lunch by a presentation from international award winners, Linda and Edgar Gibbs, who will focus on their approach to recording soundtracks. 
The second event is the Leeds A-V Group’s Colour and Music Spectacular, the world’s first established annual event, now in its 35^th year!  Running from Thursday, 4^th to Saturday 6^th March at St Chad’s Parish Centre, Headingley, Leeds, there will be approximately 20 sequences shown on a large format screen to an audience of 250.  Tickets are £5, available from either the Leeds A-V Group or Trevor Barlow.  Further details of both events are available from www.leedsavgroup.co.uk
The next AV Group meeting in Wrelton is 25th March when we will be reviewing the above events and looking at our own work. 
If you would like to dip your toe in to the AV ‘pond’ but are not sure where to start, then please come along and we will be happy to help.

There is nothing to report since the last meeting. The next meeting will take place at 7.30pm at Wrelton village hall on 25th February 2010. All members are welcome to attend.

Christmas Arrangement by John Nicoll

The Digital Group net at Wrelton on Wednesday 17^th February we started off by looking at panoramic photographs and how they are produced.
Brian showed us a number of prints where the images had been stitched using the free software provided by Canon, the final images were impressive especially where the original images all had similar toning, but sometimes where the toning wasn’t consistent you could see the joint.
Ideally the same shutter speed, aperture, focus point and white balance should be used for the series of images. Trevor then showed a massive panoramic print using images taken in the alps. No joins were visible. The software used appeared to be straightforward and when you select one image in the sequence it selects all the others in that sequence. See Trevor for details.
We then looked at HDR. We’ve all taken images where both highlights are burnt out and shadows have no details. If we expose to get details in the highlights then even more of the image turns black and similarly if we expose for the shadows even more is burnt out. This is because the sensor has a limited dynamic range. HDR attempts to overcome this problem by combining details from a number of like images taken at different exposures so that there is detail in both shadow and highlight areas. The resultant HDR image produced by the Photomatix Pro Software looks really strange (as our monitors can only display a limited dynamic range) until Tone Mapping takes place where some interesting images can be produced ranging from something reasonably realistic to almost cartoon effects. Pseudo HDR is when a single raw imaged is converted to HDR format and tone mapping applied, obviously this doesn’t have the same dynamic range as when combining a number of images but is still quite good. We then looked at using the Photomatix tone mapping plugin filter in Photoshop and with this similar results can be produced as from one raw image. The detail that can be pulled say from stonework in shadow is quite impressive and if the final image is converted to monochrome the strange colours produced during tone mapping are no longer an issue.
The next meeting is 17^th March and we will look at members work so hopefully some will have tried panoramas or HDR.