Quinebaug Valley Photography Club

QVPC is very excited about our upcoming Lou Jones presentation Speedlights & Speedlites to be held on March 18th at 7:00 pm.   Visitors are welcome and there is no fee.

Lou Jones is a commercial and fine art photographer based in Boston.  He specializes in photo-illustration and location photography for corporate clients…such as IBM, major league baseball, FedEx, National Geographic, People Magazine, Aetna and many more.  His assignments have made him a world traveler!

In addition to all of these skills, I hear that he is a fabulous speaker….you will enjoy learning from him.  So….come on down to the Dempsey Center in Putnam and join us for a very entertaining evening.

March 9th, 2010 | Category: Minutes | Leave a comment

Mary Anthony, Executive Director of the 1772 Foundation has enlisted the help of QVPC photographers in decorating the walls of their new space in the Montgomery Ward building in downtown Putnam.  We are embarking on a very fun project as we contact the historians in several nearby towns to locate interesting sites in their towns that may not be well known to the general population.  Our mission is to photograph the sites, obtain information about the sites, present them to Mary for final printing, matting and framing.

At the conclusion of the project (June at the latest), the Foundation will host a reception for the photographers and guests to view the images as they are displayed in the beautiful, gallery like setting.

Town coordinators are:

Brooklyn and Woodstock – Lori Labrecque

Eastford and Union – Suzanne Buell

Killingly and Sterling – Jeff Graley

Putnam – Jim Cutler

Plainfield – Diane LeBlanc

Hampton – Marcia Kilpatrick

Pomfret – Leslie Atsales

Thompson – Charlie Perry

Any club member is invited and encouraged to contact any one or more of the coordinators to go out and photograph with them.  Photography reflects our vision of  a place, scene or object.   Lend your vision to the project!!

March 9th, 2010 | Category: Minutes | Leave a comment

Club members will meet on Sunday, Jan 10th 2010 at 5:00 pm at Lois Latraverse’s house in Dayville to select entries for the Winter NECCC print and digital competitions.  We will also be selecting entries for the Glennie competition which is held in March.

Please bring a maximum of 6 images (print) and email a maximum of 6 images for each category.  The categories are:

Print:   Open and Black and White

Digital:  Nature and Open

Glennie Digital:  There are several nature categories so send your birds, bees, flowers, wildlife, amphibians, etc.

We would like to have excellent entries in all contests and not settle for lesser quality because we don’t have enough images presented for selection.  Got that?  It may be confusing…so, in other words, we know we have a lot of excellent images within our club, we just want to make sure that you bring (or send) a good selection of your work so that we send our best quality images to these regional competitions.

Please email your images to mrsaj1@ct.metrocast.net by Saturday at 9:00 pm, Jan 9.   The images need to be sized and named according to standards.  That would be sized horizontal to 1024 pixels and vertical 768 pixels at 72 DPI resolution.  Please name your images as follows:  QVPC$Nature$LastNameFirstName$titleofimage.jpg   If the entry is for OPEN category, change Nature to Open.

Thank you and look forward to seeing you on the 10th.  If you need directions please email me.

January 8th, 2010 | Category: Minutes | Leave a comment

Whether you agreed with her or not, Drea Koval of Southeastern Camera Club, gave us in-depth critiques for each of the entries in last nights’ competition.  Newer members, and our 3 visitors, as well as the camera club veterans  picked up valuable information from Drea’s remarks on every image.   It was a relaxed evening with time to spare before our 9:00 pm curfew!

Some housekeeping notes during the meeting portion of the evening:

• NECCC Fall Print competition was held Nov 4th….we should have the results  soon.

• NECCC Fall Digital competition…entries were sent for the Nov 18th judging in Framingham, MA. Here is the address of Boston West Photography Club if you are interested in attending the judging… Marist House, 518 Pleasant St., Framingham at 7:30 pm. The following club members have images in that competition:  Harriett Cotnoir, Lois Latraverse, Bill Marchand, Marcia Kilpatrick, Chris Atsales, Lori Labrecque and Jim Cutler.   These entries were selected on October 30th by the attendees at the selection meeting. (Remember that all club members are invited and encouraged to attend QVPC selection meetings.  We welcome varied and open opinions and we all wear thick skin for these events so you are free to share your constructive views.

• We urged members to view Carol Dunn’s website, www.caroldunnart.com, to view her many talents as an artist, photograher, printer, etc.   We are looking forward to her program on November 17th.

• Themes for December’s competition are Harvest and Festival.

• Our next selection night for the Winter Print and Digital competitions will be held in early January….a date to be announced.   Also, prior to that meeting, there will be an officer’s meeting.

November 6th, 2009 | Category: Minutes | Leave a comment

Our judge for the evening will be Drea Koval from Southeastern Camera Club.   Categories are Color Print, Black and White, and Creative/Artistic.   There is no theme competition on Print Competition nights.

Members and guests are invited to enter the competition.  Just a reminder that entries should be matted, backed with a backing mount, and labeled with the photographer’s name, category entered, and title of the image.   Entry size can be from a minimum of 4 x 6 to a maximum of 16 x 20 matted.

Check out our tips page…..will try to add at least 1 new tip a month…maybe more!  You can find it by clicking the down arrow on the Categories.

November 2nd, 2009 | Category: Minutes | Leave a comment

We had a full house last evening for our first digital competition of the 2009-2010 season.  Angelo Marinosci, Jr of Warren, RI was our excellent judge for the evening.  While we didn’t get the individual critiques that we so treasure from him, he did demonstrate which images  best answered the questions:

• What is my subject?
• When am I photographing this subject?
• What are you going to do with it?  Or what does this image say?

Good photography demands emotion…a reason to view it and something the viewer can take away from it.  Not easy to accomplish for all of us but something to strive for.  At least that is what I took away from our evening competition.

Angelo will host a spring field trip when we will spend the morning walking with him in his quaint lovely village of Warren.  Details will come later in the year but we’re looking at late April or early May.  It will be our chance to get some onsite tips.

October 2nd, 2009 | Category: Minutes | Leave a comment

Angelo is back!   Don’t miss out on our October competition.  Angelo Marinosci, Jr., for those just checking our website, is a Rhode Island artist, musician, educator, radio DJ, and fabulous photographer.  He has a knack for telling the truth without injuring anyone’s thin skin or sense of self as a photographer!  I suspect his skill for positive critiques comes from being critiqued himself over his artistic lifetime.

This is our first digital only competition.  The categories are Color Digital, Black and White Digital,  Creative Digital and Theme.  The themes this month are attitude and camera. As usual in print competitions, you may enter 2 images in each category.

For further information or questions, contact us at info@quinebaugvalleyphoto.com.

September 22nd, 2009 | Category: Minutes | Leave a comment

Bob Fedder of Southeastern Camera Club presented, with knowledge and humor, a detailed macro program complete with powerpoint lecture, a display of suggested lenses and accessories that can be used with macro photography, and completed the evening with hands on trial and error.  We had calla lilies and day lilies to work with under lighting provided by Bob.  Other club members also brought floral arrangements for everyone to work with.

Some basic macro facts:

• When using your macro lens remember the larger the magnification, the less depth of field (DOF) you will have.

• By increasing your f stop you  increase your DOF BUT each increase in f stop  doubles your shutter speed requirement.

• Use a tripod, cable release and mirror lock up to achieve sharpness.  Another helpful tool is a focusing rail which allows you to move the camera up to 12″ forward and back without moving the tripod.  Focusing rails come in various styles and price ranges.

• Increase external light by using reflectors, lamps, ringlight

• Macro lenses have a short minimum focusing distance meaning the distance from the front of the lens to the subject.   For example a 50mm macro lens focuses 1.6 inches from the subject, a 105mm lens 4.7 inches and a 180mm lens 9.1.  So you can see that the higher mm lens allows you to be further from your subject.

• You can multiply the focal length by adding a teleconverter.  This allows you to also increase your distance from the subject and the reproduction ratio.  However,  you lose 2 f stops of light.

These are just some of the highlights of Thursday night’s program.  Any club member may request to borrow the powerpoint presentation for review.  Contact:  Lois Latraverse

The evening ended a little past 9:15.

Quick Addition: See Dang Photo for some awesome macro images. Tom is a good friend, a superb photographer and has forgotten more stuff than most of us will ever learn. He has a good forum where friendly people answer all questions. (Edit: Karen Leaf)

Reproduction Ration=focal length of lens ∕ amount of extension

September 20th, 2009 | Category: Minutes | Leave a comment

Our first competition of the 2009-2010 season went very well.  Jim Dionne of Meriden was our judge and he used his tremendous knowledge and years of judging experience to offer excellent critiques with helpful hints to improve our photography. Winners have been posted to the website…click on the tab above for 2009-2010 competition winners to see who received the points for the evening.  Winning images will be added soon.

Discussion at the meeting prior to the competition included:

1) Distribution of professionally created and printed posters to publicize our club. Members are seeking places to hang the posters in their respective towns.  Our thanks to Karen Leaf for the poster design.

2) Distribution of business cards advertising the club, meeting times and dates, website and email address.

3) Discussion on Woodstock Fair moon shot field trip for Sept 4th….meeting at 6:15 in the parking lot directly across from the main entrance to the Fair.

4) Decided to enter NECCC color print competition.  Deadline for submission of entries is Oct 28th.  We will enter both Nature and Open.  We had a good start for the open category with the winners of September’s prints.

5) Would all nature shooters look through your archives for images that have not been entered in any NECCC competition.  We need 4 images from 4 makers.

6) We will be scheduling a selection night for this competition in late September.  More details to follow.

7) Karen and Lois are putting in time to make the website useful to members as well as new folks checking us out.  Please be patient as we are not experts and we are trying to work with the software as best we can.  Format may not be pleasing but hopefully the content will be helpful!

Coming in future months (we hope) are columns of interest written by members.  Perhaps a computer lesson, Photoshop technique, HDR (High Dynamic Range), a favorite local place to travel for shooting, etc.  We would like to make this website work for members and become a place to visit frequently.  We can’t do it without your participation.

9) If you want to write something for the web please do and then email it to info@quinebaugvalleyphoto.com.  We welcome your suggestions.

Lois Latraverse, President

September 4th, 2009 | Category: Minutes | Leave a comment