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My apologies for the delay in posting this one, which now accompanies my message for March.
Help! The assignment of writing a message to be delivered a month later, for February, comes at an awkward time. The festivities of the season are scarcely behind us. Meetings at Norway House and other venues have just resumed. What new items will be on the agenda before February rolls around? Perhaps I’ll look back at some items that are still top of mind, some that have just taken place and maybe take a glimpse ahead.
On a personal level, there was one project on my agenda which begged to be brought to fruition over the holidays. I needed to review the images captured during a summer cruise, select my favourites and post them to Flickr (and hence make them available to club members as well a others for browsing). Previously I had presented a sub-set dealing with Iceland to the Nature SIG. This was my chance to expand upon those to cover the locales visited in Noway, Iceland and Scotland. It was with a certain sense of satisfaction when that task was completed. The results can be seen at www.flickr.com/photos/garryschaefer/albums/.
Our January meeting at Norway House for Competitions Night provided the first opportunity of 2018 for many of our members to renew direct personal contact. It was noteworthy to me that our newly acquired laptop computer was put to good use for the first time and that the projected images held up well, at least as far as I could tell. My thanks go out to Pam Irvine for another well orchestrated evening. But, what of the competitions themselves? It goes without saying that it is hard, if not impossible, to guarantee that such a complex set of competitions will all unfold with perfection. There may have been, and were, missing comments, along with some comments that may have missed their mark. Others, either complimentary or critical, were right on. Yes, my “Iceland Rift” image did, indeed, have a distracting artifact in the upper left corner and some unwanted noise. Score one for the judge. I had completely overlooked that distracting element when I cropped the image from a shot taken through the imperfectly cleaned window of a moving tour bus. I smiled as I accepted the deductions from my score. I’ll take more care next time.
As a bottom line, I suggest that you take full advantage of VCC’s broad competition programs, both internal and external, learn what you can from the comments received, recognize that judges are human, thank them for their dedication and, then, damn the torpedoes. Happy shooting!
Garry Schaefer, President