Dear Members,
I hope the you are well. I hope that you are coping with the bizarre changes to life that we are going through.
The committee met using an online video conferencing platform called Zoom on Thursday night to discuss how we can keep the club running.
Firstly, we cannot meet together as we normally do. We can’t use the hall and we are all urged to stay at home as much as possible.
However, we can still keep the club active.
To do this we need to make some changes. Some of these changes may also change in future. The committee will be meeting together and assessing our situation on a month by month basis.
Our first change is to change the categories of our entries. There will now be Colour Digital Images, Mono Digital Images, and Digital (Small prints rules apply). We will also be restricted to 3 images in total. This is because a number of judges don’t want to judge a lot of digital images online. There is a new April Digital Only competition created on the club website. It is the second competition on the list. Please use this competition to enter images.
Our second change is to the way that we meet. The committee met using Zoom. Dave created an online meeting and sent us a link. We can have all of our members in the meeting. All you need is the link to the meeting. When you click on the link it will ask you if you want to download software to run it from your computer. To contribute you will need a webcam and a microphone. These are inbuilt with laptops. You can also use a tablet or a smart phone but you will need to download the app first. You can then click on the meeting link below in your email and it should take you to the meeting. You will need to give Zoom access to your camera and microphone. You can mute your microphone as any background noise will be picked up.
We are going to have a practice on Tuesday night at 7:30pm. Click on this link to join the meeting: https://zoom.us/j/4305275217
If you can’t join us it is okay.
I have used Zoom a fair bit in the last week and we may find it a bit chaotic at first but we will soon get the hang of it.
How the meeting will work will be similar to how the digital image section of our club nights runs. One person will be using the club laptop with the images preloaded. They will share their screen to all of your screens so that everybody sees the images. The judge will view them and award the images and the person with the laptop will move the images to the relevant folder – just as we would on any other club night.
Some tips for the meeting.
- Don’t go to the toilet. There are clips doing the rounds of social media of that happening.
- Make sure a family member doesn’t walk behind you in their underwear or even less. There are clips of that too.
- Don’t have an argument with someone in your house. I’ve seen a couple of those in the last week. Mute your microphone before you speak to someone in the room with you.
- Remember that if you are talking to one person, we all hear it.
Zoom was suggested by one of the FCC hierarchy, so we see how it works out.
Our third change will be our outings. Until further notice, they are cancelled. However, they will be replaced with newer challenges. As the Zoo Outing is cancelled we will replace it with an April photo challenge: “The Zoo In and Around your Home”
It’s not a competition. No points. No pressure. Just for fun. For sharing with members and keeping you photographically active. Be creative. The zoo could be your pets, garden insects, visiting wildlife, the feral kids… even a still life of your collection of soft animal toys!
So, snap away and upload your favourites to the website in new event we will be setting up from 1 April.
Our fourth change is to our workshops. As we can’t run them, we have some suggestions for some photography websites to look at.
https://www.unscriptedmentoring.com/blog-1/2019/1/14/xxx-tips-for-photographing-indoors
We’ll post some more later.
Finally, I would like to thank the committee for their positive attitude, contributions and ingenuity to make sure that we can continue to function in different ways during this time of social distance and self-isolation.
As everybody says, stay safe,
Tom Carlos – HHCC President
