Want a 3,200 MP camera?

The sensor is more than 60 cm in diameter.

The first digital camera

In the winter of 1975, Steven Sasson, a young engineer working in the Applied Research Lab at Kodak, tested a new device for the first time. Now known as the first true digital camera, it was cobbled together using left over parts he found in the lab. Thirty five years later President Obama awarded Sasson the National Medal of Technology and Innovation for his invention.

The first digital still camera constructed at Kodak Labs in 1975

The camera was about the size of a breadbox and took 23 seconds to take a single black and white image, which was then stored on a cassette tape (see below). While the invention was far from the digital cameras we now use, it sparked a sea change in the way images are captured. Some argue that Sasson's invention was where digital photography begins. But to say that would be to neglect the most important part of Sasson' rudimentary camera, buried deep inside its scrap parts: the Charge Coupled-Device.

A cassette tape stored 30 images

This is an extract from "Business Insider".  Click here to read the whole article and to see the first commercial digital camera, the "Mavica" by Minolta and the first DSLR, a Kodak-Nikon F3 hybrid. In 1991 it cost $30,000 and the storage device was a hard drive carried on the photographer's shoulder.

9 Compositional tips

Remember Steve McCurry, famous for the National Geographic cover photo of "The Afghan Girl"?

In this short video Steve illustrates nine "rules" of composition. It is interesting to observe that many of the examples given to illustrate a rule ignore most or all of the other rules. But then, when a couple of rules "layer", the impact is greater. Always remember his parting comment, "rules are made to be broken".

Making a triptych

There are a variety of ways to make a triptych. Here is one.

ESCC wins SAPF Annual Club Sets 2nd time in a row

ESCC results in the SAPF Annual Club Sets 2015 on Monday, 4 May 2015 were:

"Bald Eagle" by John Hodgson scored 12
"St Andrews Stairway" by Aldo Trissi scored 11
"Got My Eye on You" by Pam Barnett scored 10
"Granite Sunrise" by Ross Pollock scored 10
"Tranquility" by Robert Dettman scored 9
"Poppy" by Corliss Gustavson scored 9
"Giant Corkscrew Variation" by Bill Versteegh scored 9
"Alone" by Terry Gooley scored 8
"The Sculptor" by Jan Pudney scored 8
"The Red Lead" by Barbara Seidel scored 8

Congratulations to all concerned!  Click here to see the images.

Inter-club competition at Port Adelaide

Port Adelaide will host the three way inter-club between Marion Church of Christ Camera Club, ESCC and Port Adelaide. The details are as shown on the poster. Your committee will select our image set.

SAPF Exhibition 2015

Business as Usual – Chris Woods adelaide camera club - 2014

The SAPF Annual Exhibition is now open for entries. Entry for both print and projected images is via the photocomp upload system, the same that we use, so you will be familiar with the process. The SAPF version will recognise your email address so you go straight in. The closing date is 3:00pm 29th March and it is a sudden death cut off with no possibility of late entries, so get in early.

Click HERE to go to the SAPF web page were you will find all the necessary information including a link to the rules and a link to the upload site.

Please note that we will be entering a club set and if an image of yours is selected you can't use that image in your personal entry, either print or digital. Within 10 days we will advise which images have been selected for the club set.

7 Tips for Competition Success

Australian Photography + Digital online magazine has an excellent article on improving your chances of success in photography competitions. Click here to check it out. 

Committee recipe 02

EASY FLORENTINES

INGREDIENTS
3/4 cup sultanas
2 cups crushed Cornflakes
3/4 cup raw peanuts
1/2 cup chopped cherries
1/2 can sweet condensed milk
3 oz. dark chocolate

METHOD
Combine all ingredients in a mixing bowl. Mix well.
Grease flat baking trays and line with baking paper.
Place desert spoon fulls, or more, in small heaps.
Bake at 180 C for 15-20 minutes.
Leave to cool before lifting off.

Melt chopped chocolate over hot water, remove from heat and stir till thickened slightly.
Spread chocolate over the flat bottom side of biscuit. 
If feeling creative, mark a design with a fork.
Allow to set.

Committee recipe 01

The bus driver's mother-inlaw's almond honey slice

One of the benefits of serving on the committee is the treats that may be served. This recipe originated form someone who took a bus trip up the Hume Highway. A certain bus driver on the Euroa line likes to share with the passengers the slices her mother-in law makes.

INGREDIENTS
Base:
90g melted butter
1/2 cup firmly packed brown sugar
1 cup plain flour
1/2 cup packaged ground almonds
For the almond topping:
125 g butter chopped
1/4 cup honey
1 1/2 cups slivered almonds

METHOD
Preheat oven to 180 C
Combine base ingredients and mix well. If base seems floury, add extra melted butter. Press into a greased 9" square pan.
Bake for 15 minutes or until until lightly browned. Remove from oven and cool slightly.
Make topping: Combine butter and honey in a small saucepan and stir over heat until the butter is melted. Simmer uncovered for about 3 minutes or until light caramel colour. Stir in the nuts.
Spred base with hot topping and bake for about 15 minutes or until golden brown.
Cool in tray.
Slice to serve.

Competing without scoring

In discussing how to make the club more “user friendly” the committee have decided to offer members the option of asking for their photographs to be assessed by the judge without being scored.

We suspect our newer members in particular may find it daunting to have their work scored against the very strong pictures the more experienced members submit. Also, visitors, who are potential members, may be put off by the competitive element.

All you need do is submit your images as usual and let the record keeper, usually Renee Holmes, know prior to the start of the meeting that you don’t want your work scored. She will mark the score sheet and advise the judge when your pictures are presented. Even the judges might relax more when they don’t have to rank an image!

Another option to keep in mind ...

All members are assigned a mentor when they join. The mentors are there to help, so we urge you to approach your mentor for a personal review of your images or for that matter, anything to do with your photography. You and your mentor can decide when and where to meet.

Atkins summer school

Atkins run their Summer School every summer. Duh! This year it is in February with seven topics. There is a small charge for each. There might be something amongst theses topics that interests you. The details are here.

Album design
Managing your image library
Analysing your business
Gaining deeper cistomer insights
Photoshop and preparing images for print
Building a business of lasting value
The film challenge

New look website

Paul O'leary has given our website a fresh new look for 2015. The content is basically the same but you will see that the program page has been replaced with an EVENTS calendar. This has the advantage that, as there year progresses, past events drop off and the next event in chronological order is presented at the top of the list. Competitions that include PDI have a link to the upload site. We hope you find these changes convenient.

The essential parts of the old PROGRAM page that are not suitable for inclusion in the calendar format are now to be found in COMPETITION INFO in the side menu. There you will find a list of the competitions, subject definitions, rules and information about the Annual Exhibition. The Program and Definitions can be downloaded form here as well. The "Members Only" area is also accessed from the side menu.

Since email is the most efficient way of communicating with members, the SECRETARIAL MESSAGES page has gone. We will persist with the BLOG in the hope that one day someone might read a post and be moved to make a comment. [Hint]. It would be nice to get some discussion going. You can start by recording your impressions of the website here.

The three images at the bottom of the HOME page will, with a click, give direct access to Member's Images, Exhibition Images and Events. There have been many other refinements, one being a smart new look for the galleries.

Please browse around and give us your thoughts by commenting below.

Yvonne Hill in the news

Members will know Yvonne Hill as a judge who most recently judged for our club last May. Yvonne has won the Macular Disease Foundation Australia 2014 Photographic Competition in the Macular Disease Community category. You can see the ABC News report  here.

Seidels in the USA part 2

Having escaped the controlled itinerary of the photo tour we embarked on 9 days of independent travel, covering some of the same territory that we had just covered. The reasons for this are a long story with the photo tour itinerary changing a few times over the previous eight months.

Covering the same territory again is not necessarily a bad thing - as an unconstrained re-visiting of places visited on the tour allowed us to be more touristy and also find our own photographs away from some of the more obvious locations. We had obtained a modicum of familiarity if not local knowledge to help us along the way, which helped the driving on the wrong side of the road and the navigation. Besides, we had only just touched the surface of what we could see in all those places.

A return to Las Vegas before our flight home was also a much more enjoyable experience - a much better hotel with more accessibility to good food, shopping and entertainment certainly helped.

So after 14 days captive to someone else's itinerary we returned to Monument Valley, staying at the View Hotel - the only hotel within the park that is a stunning location for the sunset view of two buttes (the Mittens). The View Hotel was a truly wonderful location - pricey but worth it for the view. Surprisingly the food here was inexpensive given the select location - and booze prices were not an issue as the Navajo nation is dry. Non-alcoholic beer was surprisingly tasty. Non-alcoholic wine was disgusting!

                                                     View Hotel - our morning view with restaurant balcony

                                                                                          Sunrise Monument Valley

From Monument Valley we then travelled to Page, on Lake Powell - the upstream dam on the Colorado River. Here we finally got touristy - mixing a six hour photographic tour in Canyon X with a Lake Cruise. Canyon X is another slot canyon that is accessed by only one operator. With travel and walking time taken off we had nearly four hours photographing in the two parts of this slot canyon with no distractions from other tours.

                             Canyon X

Lake Powell is starkly beautiful, and a houseboat mecca in summer. Our cruise took us into the lower reaches of Antelope Canyon to the point where the boat could go no further - narrow cliffs and just 5 feet of water under us. A boat cruise on a river or lake is always refreshing and set us in good mood for the rest of our trip.

Lake Powell, Glen Canyon Dam

The Grand Canyon was our next stop - and we took the opportunity to play tourist with ranger talks and headed in the opposite direction around the rim to that which we had done on the photography tour. Strong contrasty and hazy light again filled the canyon adding to the photographic challenge of making interesting compositions of something so familiar to all.

                                                                                Elk stag at Mather Point, Grand Canyon

                                                                                              Grand Canyon Views

Our next stop took us to new territory - Death Valley. Primal landscapes and 30 degree C heat in late autumn met us as we finally found our accommodation at Stovepipe Wells - a village that our GPS did not know about. This village is near the Mesquite Sand Dunes, very photogenic but almost always covered with tourists and their footprints whether at dawn or sunset. (Fortunately Photoshop can fix this minor distraction.)

Mesquite Sand Dunes in Death Valley - with or without Photoshop help

Parts of Death Valley had been mined for Borax and other minerals in the late 1800s to mid 1900s so it is hard to say how much of the landscape is natural, however the floor of the valley is well vegetated (in an arid sense) and the surrounding mountains were essentially free of vegetation. From the US low of 282 feet below sea level to over 11,000 feet in just a few miles are the extremes on show.

Much of the landscape here exhibits classic badlands erosion - none moreso than Zabriskie Point, where the lookout will soon be closed for repairs to the erosion that is undercutting the famous monument. Whilst there we saw a group of photographers making and exposing collodion glass plate negatives (an 1850-60s technology) using a tent as a makeshift darkroom.

Badwater Basin - lowest point in the US and badlands erosion at Zabriskie Point

Finally we returned to Las Vegas, where our Presidential Room at Planet Hollywood erased the after effects of the horrible hotel from where we started our US tour. I say Presidential Room - it was really a Presidential Film Room - as the Planet Hollywood has film-themed rooms throughout. This was a positive Vegas experience - we found good food (Gordon Ramsey's Burgr Bar was a real highlight and not too expensive), interesting shops and even great coffee (real latte and macchiato).

Las Vegas Daytime - less glitz

                                                       Faking it in Vegas - interior scene in a shopping mall

Being located on the strip was also a bonus so we could venture out into the action if we wanted. We had to wonder about a couple of things though - M&M world was a 4-floor marketing push of everything M&M without any free samples. We didn't bother with Hershey World as the chocolate is not worth worrying about.

Finally, we had to return home tour our now lonely puppy Tawny as we had lost Dalace just before we went away. Our final future laugh point once the pain goes away was to find that our travel agent (used by the tour company) that we had booked things through had only allowed us 65 minutes from landing in LA to our Sydney flight's departure time. Fortunately American Airlines and Qantas came to the party and got us onto a later flight from LA to Sydney which was just as well. At LA we had a delay in the shuttle bus arrangements between domestic arrival and international departure such that we didn't arrive in the international terminal until 10 minutes after our original flight had departed. Our Airbus 380 flight, carefully booked on our part was lost to a much noisier flight on a 747.

In all we enjoyed the hospitality, politeness (they don't seem to swear much at all) and customer service (one notable exception).

There was familiarity in the arid landscapes (apart from the big bumpy bits); the look of the arid vegetation; the long, wide and fairly straight roads; and, even the light was similar to our outback light.

Poor quality or non-existent wifi bandwidth and phone coverage was another reminder of travelling through the outback regions of South Australia.

The movie references everywhere were strong (especially in Monument Valley and Death Valley) - but a favourite movie poster at Death Valley was for Robinson Crusoe on Mars from 1964, listing Mona the Woolly Monkey as third in the acting credits.

Along the way we lost the novelty of mexican food - but not margeritas, became accustomed to filtered black coffee in the mornings and enjoyed the steaks, ribs and crispy bacon.

Finally, it is the beauty of the national parks visited that will stay with us. Wonderful just for the experiences of being there, as well as providing interesting photographic locations.

Cheers

Keith & Barb

Free light painting workshop

Diamonds are running a free workshop on the fun activity of light painting. 

When: Saturday 29th November 2014.
Where: Diamonds Training Suite, Level 2, 187 Rundle Street, Adelaide.

Seidels in the USA pt 1

Our final stage in the Seidel year of international travel commenced on October 18 with flights from Adelaide to Sydney, Sydney to LA (delayed by engineering problems then the fuel was disconnected from the international terminal), LA to Las Vegas (delayed because of previous delay). We finally arrived several hours late and somewhat tired.
The reason for the trip was that last year I (Keith) won a photo tour of the Canyonlands area of the South West USA.
The tour started in Las Vegas where the highlights were few after such long travel - the best thing about Vegas is leaving! If we Australians sometimes see the US as a land of contradictions, then Las Vegas is surely the greatest contradiction of all. Hoover Dam and being re-introduced to Margheritas were of interest, a helicopter flight over the grand canyon was too cramped for any quality photography, and then there was a neon graveyard.If it's

                                                                           Las Vegas - get me outa here

Tuesday, it must be ...
The photo tour was a mix of bus tour for photographers and a workshop - with a local photographer to provide guidance and sunrise and sunset shoots scheduled everyday - including travel days. Whilst all locations were good - the tour became a marathon in the end with no planned rest breaks.
After leaving Vegas (hooray) our first of seven national parks was Zion National Park. This was wonderful - with a deep canyon filled with autumn colour and several deer to start off the fur'n'feathers requirements for the trip. Probably the most accessible and varied of the locations we visited.

Autumn Colour and Deer in Zion Canyon

Leaving Zion the landscape changed within the park, with the first evidence of weathered rock faces that make up much of the park features across the Colorado Plateau.

Weathered Rock - Zion National Park

From 2 days in Zion we moved on to Bryce Canyon - the first of several 1 night stays. Familiar to most photographers, Bryce was as expected. Three visits gave sunset, sunrise and late morning light to work with at different parts of the canyon, which is much larger than we expected (extends for almost 20 miles)

                                                                                      Bryce Canyon at dawn

Our next stop was another one-nighter visit to the least known of the parks we visited - Capitol Reef. Beautiful autumn colour and red rock faces gave way to dull gray badlands erosion. More time would have revealed more gems, but we had to move on to Moab for the Arches and Canyonlands National Parks.

Autumn colour and dismal badlands in the Capitol Reef area.

Arches National Park was the second Park to exceed expectations. The combination of eroded arches and steep canyons was a highlight. Within the park is Delicate Arch (the state symbol of Utah) - an hour walk worth the considerable effort at altitude with a significant climb from the valley floor.

Delicate Arch - the crowds actually made way for the sunset photography

Park Avenue and Sunset from Delicate Arch - Arches National Park

This was a park that we could easily return to - for obvious reasons.
Mesa Arch was the main highlight of Canyonlands National Park - with cameras three deep awaiting the sunrise 'money' shot.
 

                                   Mesa Arch

Monument Valley was our next one nighter - the park is within the lands of the sovereign Navajo nation. References to western movies (esp. John Ford and John Wayne) and Navajo culture abound - and our trip around the self drive trail gave us some different angles for sunset. A visit the next morning to the "Forest Gump Highway" gave us the classic/iconic/clichéd view of Monument Valley from the north.

Contrasting views of Monument Valley.

Our photographic tour then took us to Page where we visited Horseshoe Bend (not for the faint hearted) and the famed Antelope Canyon (another absolute highlight). The photos we have all seen of the slot canyons (Antelope) are photographed in very confined spaces making the results an amazing achievement. It was such a good experience that we are returning to Page this week to visit a private slot canyon (Canyon X) for more.

Horseshoe Bend and Antelope Canyon

Our final destination was the Grand Canyon and in three days we barely scratched the surface. Our photography leader Glen Tamblingson specialises in the Grand Canyon and took us to several locations a bit off the general tourist track.
Grand Canyon Views

Grand Canyon Viewa

Our circuit of the Canyonlands covered over 2000 miles in 12 days (excluding the days spent in Vegas). The low, arid vegetation and bright harsh light are very familiar to Australian eyes - although whereas the Australian landscape is weathered, uplifted material - the Colorado Plateau at between 5000 and 9000 feet above sea level provides a fairly flat landscape (locally) where the erosion has cut down into the landscape.
Apart from mule deer, elk, a few chipmunks and one squirrel we have seen little wildlife in our travels and few birds apart from the omnipresent ravens.

                                                                                       Autumn Colour

So, what of the food and wine?
Unlike our previous travel reports (from Italy) we are unable to rave on uncontrollably about gourmet food and stunning local wines, leave alone great coffee. It is scary that the best beer we have had so far is the de-alcoholised beer at the View Hotel, Monument Valley. (The Navajo lands are dry!) We have had a couple of nice local cabernets, but our first red order of a "cabernet" at a steakhouse was a truly horrible Jacobs Creek 2011 Cab Sav.
Travelling in a photo tour in a 12 seat van was a bit like being contained within a cocoon - there was little opportunity to spread out to be adventurous food wise or to gain a better appreciation of the locals. Where possible we did try local Navajo influenced foods - but generally its been steakhouse, pizza or mexican.
Whilst the meals have rarely been bad or too oversized - there is a simplicity to the food preparation in the areas visited with steaks and pork ribs being the safest and best choices. The coffee - well its black and hot. The discovery of Thai restaurants on two occasions has been a saviour in the flavour stakes.

                                                                    We were there - Grand Canyon

We now have a just over a week travelling on our own arrangements before our return - it should allow us a bit more time to experience the real South West.
Cheers
Keith & Barb