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Message From the President
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 President's Report. June 2016
Greetings everyone,
As most of you will be aware, some of us have just returned from the annual VAPS convention, held this year in Albury.
It was one of the best that we, as an organization, have done. The committee, have received many emails and expressions of thanks for the wonderful pre-convention organization, the venue and the presenters. The amount of work, done by Brian Paatsch, and his crew from the Wodonga Albury camera club was magnificent. I want to personally thank the crew as a whole for the tremendous job they all did. As President, and on behalf of the Victorian Association of Photographic Societies I would like to sincerely thank the Commercial Club and the wonderful staff for making our conference weekend a huge success. The facilities were excellent and the food preparation on Saturday night and Sunday lunch were just fantastic and of a very high standard.
All of our members have commented on how well the event progressed from the Friday through Sunday. The staff, assisting, were very professional and handled additional requests with ease. The overall conference has been voted in large as the best yet and many comments received "can we come back here in the future", so we may do that, sometime down the track.
I would like to personally thank all members of our committee and the other volunteers for an exceptional and highly organized job, both before, during and after the convention.
For those of you who were not able to attend, you missed a great convention and we are sorry for that. Maybe in the coming years, we can encourage many more of you to think about attending, as it could be a lovely part of your photographic calendar.
Ian Rolfe
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Message From the Newsbrief Editor
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A comment on VAPS Convention.
This was the first Convention I have attended and I enjoyed it very much.
The facilities were excellent and much work had been done to set up the exhibition of prints. Registration was smoothly done.
Ian Rolfe's Key Note. "The Amplified Landscape" provided great motivation for me to think more about my landscape photography. Learning never ends. David Anderson's topic "War Stories" covered his work with portraits/performance photography in the music industry. Wow! So much to motivate me. I do practically no portrait work and now I want to start thinking about light with portraiture. So motivational. Mark Galer spoke on "Creative workflow using Adobe Lightroom. It was so good to get jolted out of my workflow in Lightroom and think again. I needed that. There is always an easier way to do things! "Why was I never told before?" Thank you, Mark!. How good it is to relook at my design and composition knowledge. Thanks, Ian Rolfe, for your talk on Design and Composition.
The next deserves a paragraph for itself. Steve Axford's presentation on "The wonderful world of fungi" had the audience in awe. We just gasped when we saw the time lapse clips. Some of these took a week or two to photograph. Just wonderful.
David Taylor's "Shooting from Above" was also stunning. Shooting from his own plane, he created wonderful images demonstrating the beauty, age, colours and structures seen in the Australian landscape when viewed from above.
Overall. I thought it was a well-balanced program of speakers. Motivation! Information! Enjoyment and wonder.
It was excellent to see members renewing their network connections with people they know from their photographic activities.
A great weekend!
Now it is a chance for you to have your comment or photograph from the convention included in the July Newsbrief. Who took some photographs on the photoshoots? What activity or address did you find stimulating? How do you think it might change the way you approach your photography in the future?
Now I have to get out and take some photographs and breathe some fresh air.
On reading the Warragul Camera Club's Newsletter I noticed that they have a member profile article in it. Ron Paynter is a relatively new member of the club and what a great way to introduce him to other members of the club. Does your club do anything like that in your Newsletter? Well done Warragul.
Possible New Club in Bundoora area. Trevor Thomas is mentoring a group of people who meet in a community facility in Bundoora and it has got to the stage where they might form a club with the assistance of Trevor. Well done Trevor, I hope things go well.
Barry Povey (Berwick Viewfinders Camera Club)
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 FROM THE CONVENTION HOST DESK.
Please keep those completed survey forms coming in as they provide important information to our host club and city. Any suggestions/comments will be passed onto next year's host club.
Albury Council in line with OH&S regulations did not permit us to display our VAPS direction board outside our Friday night venue.
Due to last minute "rain" changes at the Saturday model shoot the direction board was overlooked. I apologise to those who had to perform a seek and find.
Model release documents had been signed off by the parents of our under age girls for the model shoot. Due to their knowledge of our camera club they felt it unnecessary to be present.
Any further comments will be replied to next month.
Brian Paatsch
Convention Chair.
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Some starting images from the VAPS convention. We need to see yours for next month.
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Albury Mayor, Henk van de Ven, opening the Convention - David Willis
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Brian Paatsch addressing the convention - David Willis
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| Debbie and Sharon - David Willis |
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| Ian Rolfe addressing the convention - David Willis |
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Welcome to country ceremony. - David Willis
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| Part of the exhibition of images. - David Willis |
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| Mark with speaker David Taylor - David Willis |
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| "Leap of faith". Careful examination. - Barry Povey |
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| Getting eye to eye with the images. - Barry povey |
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Explorations - Barry Povey
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Coffee at last! - Barry Povey
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| Carefully listening to Ian. - Barry Povey |
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Admiring the winning print. - Barry Povey
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In anticipation. - Barry Povey
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From Clubs/Societies and Others
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| The Hills Photographic Society |
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A very successful first meeting of the Hills Photographic Society, Emerald was held on Thursday evening 9th June.
The meeting confirmed the club name, elected a committee and discussed items programming, such as presentations by members, conducting competitions and holding workshops.
Two members presented samples of their work, one in digital form on the big screen whilst the other displayed his in large print format. A lively discussion followed the presentations.
It was an excellent introduction for club members as it demonstrated the range of interests and styles we are likely to encounter within the club.
The club will now meet on the 2nd Thursday at the Emerald U3A building in Emerald. The future looks promising.
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| Warragul National Exhibition |
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Report from The Warragul Camera Club Inc., On the 13th May- 19th May we held our 43rd National Exhibition, after 16 years we returned to the West Gippsland Arts Centre in Warragul, the official opening Saturday 14th May at 3pm. We are very grateful for the support given to us by the Baw Baw Shire and the West Gippsland Arts Centre who made it possible for us to present a very professional exhibition.
Officiating at the opening were representatives from the Shire Councillor Debbie Brown who opened the exhibition, Peter Kewley representing VAPS, and a number of our sponsors, including Carolyn Turner, editor of the Warragul Gazette together with Darren Spargo owner of Roylaines. Both are sponsors of the Gazette Readers' Competition which we host during our exhibition.
In attendance were many other distinguished guests, members of APS, many entrants and visitors. Louise Sedgman our National Chairman welcomed everyone and spoke about how proud we were to be back at the Arts Centre and able to present such an excellent exhibition in such a beautiful space. She also thanked our sponsors, entrants and members of our club for doing all the work involved, it is definitely a team effort.
Max Lane from Frankston club took out the Roy and Elaine Berryman Award for the best image of the entire exhibition with his image Song Bird. Frankston also won the Most Successful Club award.
We have started planning for our 2017 exhibition and have some ideas that might inspire all the images makers out there to do more prints. We are concerned that the print entries are fewer each year. Without prints, there is no exhibition so we do encourage you all to try and enter more prints. We understand that it is getting very expensive to send prints now and the postage is so unreliable when you have closing dates to adhere to. If anyone has any brilliant ideas how to overcome this issue we would be pleased to hear from you.
Ruth Burleigh
President Warragul Camera Club Inc.,
PER: Louise Sedgman Chairman of the National Committee.
Return to Contents
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Jim Weatherill and Marg Huxtable
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Sponsor Darren Spargo representing Roylaines Warragul and Pakenham, sponsor Robyn Wright also club member Wright Builders, Peter Kewley representing VAPS, sponsors Virginia & Graeme Glasson representing Digital Works Hallam, sponsor Bruce Langdon also club member Bruce Langdon Design, Louise Sedgman Chairman of National Committee, Debbie Brown Councillor for Baw Baw Shire and official opener of the exhibition, sponsor Carolyn Turner Editor of the Warragul & Drouin Gazette.
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Max Lane winner of most outstanding image in exhibition
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View of part of the exhibition
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The article below has been reproduced with the kind permission of Richard Brown FRPS, after appearing in the Royal Photographic Society's AV News. Richard is one of the most successful AV authors in UK and Europe. The article highlights problems experienced here in Australia too. It may help readers understand the complexity (and therefore the fascinating challenges) of making and judging AV sequences.
It is food for thought, but with so many stories to tell - why don't you give it a go?
Barb Butler, Melbourne Camera Club
AV "under the yoke" of photography
by
Richard Brown FRPS
Let's get one thing out right off the bat: I don't particularly regard myself as being a photographer. Of course, I'm interested in photography. I take photographs. I like looking at photographs and talking about them. But first and foremost, I'm an AV producer. I'm interested in ideas and communicating them to an audience. If that goal is best served visually by using my own photos, archive images, paintings, graphics or anything else, then I'm perfectly happy with that. Since most of the sequences I produce are historical in nature, this is an important consideration.
Photography is one of the elements that go to make up an AV sequence, but it's not more important than any of the others. Unfortunately, for some purist photographers, this notion is anathema. Even if they tolerate AV, it's only on the basis that the photographic content has to take priority. To them, AV isn't really a communication medium at all. It's just a mechanism for presenting a set of the author's photographs and all other considerations have to flow from that basic premise. When I've occasionally judged AV competitions with photographers who were not AV workers, I've been surprised and depressed by how little attention they've paid to the idea, story, scriptwriting, choice and use of music, quality of voice-over, changes of pace etc. etc. They seem to spend the entire time mentally pressing 2, 3, 4 or 5 buttons as each individual picture goes through, as though they were judging a PDI salon.
The winning sequence is the one with the highest total score. Out of politeness, they may grudgingly acknowledge the significance of sound and production values, but they don't really believe it. For as long as I've been involved, it has been a rather wearisome standing joke that AV isn't 'proper' photography. It's the last bastion for people who are incapable of taking decent pictures. For most of that time, that's as far as things have gone. The photographic establishment has by and large left AV to its own devices. But for some reason, in the recent past a seeming desire to 'put AV in its place' has gained sufficient traction to start negatively impacting upon its activities. One of the most visible ways in which this trend has manifested itself is with regard to the acceptability, or not, of third party images. To my considerable dismay, my own federation, the MCPF has arbitrarily decided to impose a limit on the percentage of third party imagery allowed in entries for its AV competition. This is itself merely a slavish copying of the identical restriction imposed by the PAGB on sequences submitted for its Awards.
These restrictions are not only unnecessary and unworkable in practice, they are also illogical. Why should a sequence that has twenty-five archive images out of its one hundred pictures be completely acceptable, but one that has twenty-six, completely unacceptable? Is an image on the screen which is partly archive and partly the author's one of the twenty-five or not? And who is responsible for deciding and counting them anyway?
When analysed in these terms the whole thing is revealed for the farce that it is. The red herring which is always wheeled out on these occasions is that since the award or competition is under the aegis of a photographic organisation, the quality of the photography has to be ensured. The clear message that AV assessors and judges are incapable of recognising photographic input and merit of whatever sort without such a restriction in place is patronising in the extreme. In point of fact, the PAGB has let slip its true colours in this regard by insisting that the assessment panels for AV Awards must always have some members who are specifically not AV workers! There's a vote of confidence in the competence of the AV judges which the PAGB itself has appointed. One can just imagine the mighty furore that would ensue if it was decided that in order to ensure equality of standards, all print assessment panels had to include at least one AV worker. But when that situation is precisely reversed, it's perfectly acceptable. Evidently the concept of judgement by one's peers is flexible when certain people in the hierarchy are able to insist on their prejudices being accommodated.
The underlying rationale for restricting third party imaging appears to be that it's somehow cheating. The knee-jerk reaction is that it's always easier to use archive images and the only way to demonstrate photographic ability is by the act of taking pictures. But how true is that? Let's look at cases. Howard Bagshaw's Migrant Mother is a classic documentary sequence. It's a great story brilliantly told, with top-notch quality in every department. It won the gold medal in the RPS International AV Festival in 2010, so clearly the judges were unfazed by the fact that almost every picture in it originated from the Library of Congress. One of the reasons it works so well as a production is Howard's editorial ability in selecting the right images in the first place and then his amazing Photoshop skills in re-versioning, blending and animating them seamlessly together to tell the visual story. The resourcefulness and ingenuity required to make archive images usable in an AV context are often comparable to or even greater than that required for other types of picture making.
Contrast Migrant Mother with a landscape sequence containing stunning original photography, the type the PAGB et al clearly approve of. The content of the scenes themselves, i.e. the main thing that makes them stunning in the first place, has nothing to do with the photographer. The landscape, the weather conditions, and the lighting are ironically enough, all provided by a third party, in this case, nature. A seeing eye is needed for the composition, but everything else is already there. With an autofocus, auto exposure camera, practically anyone ought to be able to take a decent photo of what's put in front of them. The end result may be beautiful to look at and may even have required a huge amount of physical effort to achieve, but as far as I am concerned, the second AV hasn't taken any more photographic skill to produce than the first. It's just that that skill is expressed in a different way. Curiously enough, this mode of thinking is already espoused by the photographic establishment, if they would only recognise it as being inconveniently the case. A current popular trend for awards at major exhibitions and in distinctions is for highly complex 'fantasy' type pictures assembled from a multitude of starting images, all of which have been so heavily manipulated in Photoshop that their original quality is virtually unrecognisable. Very often, the photographic skills that are being rewarded have practically nothing to do with original picture taking. In my view, this makes a nonsense of the objections to third party imaging in AV.
The late Howard Gregory long argued that AV has, in fact, suffered rather than benefitted from being under the umbrella of photographic organisations, when historically it might just as easily have been incorporated with cine, tape recording or the magic lantern. I must confess, on current evidence I am well along the road to agreeing with him. The fundamental question has really nothing to do with photography but is much more universal. It is simply this. Why should my participation and enjoyment of my chosen pastime be curtailed by other people, who for the most part have no involvement in or appreciation of it, simply to satisfy what they deem to be acceptable?
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Wodonga Albury Camera Club
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Just a well done to the Wodonga Albury Camera Club for all the work on the Convention
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Thanks to John Conway and the GCC for permission to include this from their newsletter.
This was GCC's third visit to Merrijig Lodge in recent history, something that would indicate it being a popular destination, especially in the Autumn. With the nearby locations of Lake Eildon for those early morning atmospheric sunrises, the colourful Jamieson in all its autumn glory, or the spectacular views up on Mt Buller (before the snow arrives or in the case of this camp, heavy fog) there's something for everyone.
A very damp Friday departure was on the cards for everyone, seemed like all of Victoria was getting the same damp treatment so there was no escape and Friday was basically the day to gather at the lodge and plan the "photography attack" for the following day.
A visit to the "pub" located across the road for a meal was well received, the servings were huge (and that is no exaggeration) you certainly get value for money when out in the country.
Ketut had done some homework and we all followed his lead to venture to Gough's Bay on Lake Eildon for the Saturday sunrise, fog gave way to mist and many an atmospheric capture were to be had, looking forward to seeing these appear in the monthly competitions ahead.
A return to base for breakfast and showers, then next plan was to explore the surroundings, a few opting to visit Jamieson while the rest travelled on to Mt Buller. The weather closed in with rain but as we neared the location that was replaced with very heavy mist, which cleared briefly at times to reveal the surrounding ranges.
The trek home to the lodge gave way to so golden light, it seems that the misty location was a distant past.
Ketut has put together a wonderful AV from the weekend, including the comparison of water level at Bonnie Doon, from last year to this. Many thanks to all that contributed images for the AV and the ones here in the newsletter. It's a wonderful part of the country up around the Merrijig area, especially when autumn is displaying all it's "golden wonder" As this was the third time the club has been here, who knows when the next one may be, would it would be well worth your while considering an overnight stay at any of the accommodations available, with plenty to see and explore, I'm sure you won't be disappointed.
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Australian Photographic Judges Association
APJA training 2016
Australian Photographic Judges Association is conducting training in 2016 for Levels 1, 2, and 3.
If you are a judge then this training is for you. If you are interested in becoming a judge then this training is for you.
If you are just interested in learning more and improving your photography skills then this training is for you.
Sunday July 10
Level 3
Sunday August 7
Level 2
Sunday September 11
Level 1
All are held at St. Peters Anglican Church Hall
Cnr. Ames Ave & Neerim Rd Murrumbeena. (Melway 68 K5)
BYO lunch. Morning and afternoon teas provided.
Cost: APJA members $15
Persons on the current Judges List $20
Others $25
Contact to register:
Alfred Zommers asgz47_99@outlook.com For Level 3
(Note: the underscore between 7&9}
Rob Sloane msec@optusnet.com.au For level 3 and 1
Gerry Gibson gg@gerrygibson.com.au For Level 2 and 1
Paul Robinson pr.artpics@gmail.com For Info on training.
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Victorian Association of Photographic Societies Inc Welcomes Epson Australia Pty Ltd
A new and valued sponsor for our members' benefit.
Special Offer from Epson for VAPS Club Members
Register at the following link to receive a $20 online shop voucher as well as many offers from the Epson range of products.
We encourage our club members to support Epson in your next printer purchase. Visit their website at epson.com.au to get all of the information on the new Epson SureColor SC‐P600.
Thank you Epson for your support to the Camera Clubs of Victoria |
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Any members of an accredited Camera Club or Society interested in evaluating images or judging are invited to apply to join the Australian Photographic Judges Association.
You do not need to be an active judge to be a member.
The prime objective of the Association is to help develop the evaluation and judging skills of members.
Further information contact:
Rob Sloane: msec@optusnet.com.au or
Paul Robinson: pr.artpics@gmail.com
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RECEIVE YOUR FREE EMAIL COPY OF NEWSBRIEF DIRECT
SUBSCRIBE AT
http://www.vaps.org.au/newsbrief
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www.vaps.org.au
Open the News tab and select Newsbrief newsletters.
There you can subscribe for a free email copy of Newsbrief.
Keep up with all of the announcements and news from the clubs.
Hard copy of Newsbrief is not be available in 2016 |
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Victorian Association
of Photographic Societies Inc.
- To advance the art of photography.
- To further the interests of affiliated bodies.
- To draw up regulations governing exhibitions and inter-club competitions.
- To arrange the exchange of guest lecturers and demonstrations on any subject relating to photography.
- To arrange the exchange of prints between clubs.
- To arrange periodical conventions for members of affiliated bodies and guests.
- To arrange the publication of an official journal or news sheet .
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A Brief History:
Camera clubs have existed in Melbourne since the 1890's and an umbrella organisation called the Victorian Photographic Affiliation was formed in 1908. This guided amateur photography in Victoria for forty years. The Victorian Association of Photographic Societies was formed on 27 September 1952 and comprised of 12 clubs. This has grown to more than 70 clubs in Jan 2016. VAPS is a non-profit association that is entirely self-funded. The Association is run by an elected Committee of Management which is responsible for the operations of the Association, and for ensuring the Association fulfils the objectives.
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Legal
Victorian Association of Photographic Societies welcomes contributions from interested parties, however, Victorian Association of Photographic Societies accepts no responsibility for the content of these contributions and the views contained therein are not necessarily those of Victorian Association of Photographic Societies. While every care is taken with solicited and unsolicited materials supplied, Victorian Association of Photographic Societies does not accept any liability for loss or damage however caused. Victorian Association of Photographic Societies takes no responsibility for the claims made by advertisers or transactions by. Does not endorse the products sold on the website/Newsbrief or enter into any of the exchanges. Nor is the Victorian Association of Photographic Societies responsible for any exchanging of information or monetary amounts. All transactions are solely the responsibility of the advertiser and purchaser.
Copyright
Material on the Victorian Association of Photographic Societies site or the Newsbrief may not be reproduced or published elsewhere without the written consent of the publisher, Victorian Association of Photographic Societies. All rights reserved.
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Next Issue - July
Newsbrief publication deadline 26 June 2016.
Commercial advertisements cost $50 (Full page $100)
Newsbrief Editor: Barry Povey: editor@vaps.org.au
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