Bournemouth — Mar 17th 2015

The main feature of this evening's meeting was a talk on Making Photos by Peter Shepheard. He began by putting up three photographs of the same subject and polling the audience on which one they preferred. Evaluation of the results was promised later. . . .

We were also surveyed briefly on what we actually did with our photos. Rather shamefully, 'nothing' came out clearly on top in this one, so Peter went on to talk about the qualities of a photo that might make it more likely to be used - how does it engage the viewer? Does it stir emotion, create a sense of intrigue or tell a story?

The problems of distracting backgrounds or bright spots were then illustrated, together with ways of avoiding them.

Next up was the subject of composition. It was here that we learned why most of us preferred the same one of the three photos that were shown at the beginning - apparently we have a strong preference for diagonals - as well as thirds, golden ratios, leading lines, symmetry and patterns.

The pros and cons of using fill-in flash and tips on avoiding lens flare were covered before showing how unwanted objects (or, in Peter's case, unwanted people!) could easily be removed.

The last section of Peter's talk dealt with getting the best out of the iPhone which has become quite a capable camera. After a review of some of the new features of iOS8, Peter showed some additional facilities offered by a third party app called ProCamera. This rounded off a very enjoyable and informative talk.

The usual Q & A session followed which covered photo management issues, during which we learned from Solutions about Apple's plans to try to simplify this increasingly confusing area. Other problems, particularly relating to messaging, were also raised, some of which may well have been linked to a major iCloud service issue the previous week. Finally Tony stressed that the recent flood of updates to Adobe Flash do relate to security issues so anyone using Flash really should make sure to keep it up to date.

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