Happy New Year to all our Readers!
Despite the political unrest around the globe and the fears about the Climate Emergency, the City of London and Cripplegate Photographic Society started the year well, with an upbeat and sociable event, in several parts. First though, congratulations to one of our members on the birth of her son this week - we had hoped she might have brought him in last night for us to practise our newborn photography, but maybe later.
Many thanks to all those people who emptied their cupboards to bring in unused equipment and books to raise money for the society and thanks too to those people who purchased items they hadn't even known they needed, until seeing them on that table. We had our washing line up for a pop-up gallery of prints featuring Tower Bridge - mostly taken on the Christmas walk at the end of December. The brief had been to make images which were different from the usual postcard views of this iconic London landmark, and the twenty images strung along the line certainly fulfilled the challenge. Andy Heather, one of our newer members, won with a grid of abstract black and white images. John Murray and Rob Wilkinson tied for second place. John's image was of a section of the illuminated arch. Rob, not even shooting with his regular camera, captured the Shard looming beyond the bridge.
Two
Tiger Trophy presentations were made - for November and December, to Alan Larsen and John Murray respectively - congratulations to them and John introduced us to the committee's plan to use Pick of the Week (POTW), our Flickr group, in January to stimulate our participation in
HATS - Hands Across the Sea. This is our friendly competition with Hendersonville Camera Club in North Carolina, as we have two members who commute between here and there. It is the third HATS, and this time the four categories are
Night,
Wild,
Home and
Time and Place. Members are encouraged to use their five-a-week Flickr ration to share possible entries. If you are already enrolled in POTW click
here to read about using it for HATS. Or if you want to join POTW, begin
here.
We finished with a loud and rowdy discussion of resolutions we intend to do and stop doing, photographically - enter no competitions, enter more competitions, take more film, take no film, etc and then Richard Eyers invited suggestions for the future programme. It was a positive, robust start to 2020. Thanks to Chris Jepson for the images:
