Newsletter ISSUE N°3
Fall 2009
In Focus!
The Camera Club of Hendersonville
March 2015
Steering Committee:
Ron Anderson, Treasurer:
Mitch Randall, Presenter:
Walt Chase, Website:
Bob Benedict, Newsletter
Bob Coffey
ronwande@bellsouthnet
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
Next Meeting:
The Club meets March 24 at 6:30 pm at the Chamber of
Commerce Building, 204 Kanuga Road (intersection with
Church Street).
Critique Group:
Meets Tuesday, March 10 of at 1:00 at the Unitarian
Community Church, 2021 Kanuga Road.
March Meeting
One half of the meeting will be Show and Tell. By12:00
PM March 21, send up to three photographs to Peter
Jones: [email protected]
The format for labeling photos is on the Club website at:
www.cameraclubofhendersonville.com
The other half of the meeting will be a presentation by
Ron Partin of scenes from Historic Hendersonville.
Ron is a Professor Emeritus at Bowling Green University.
He taught courses in education consultation, mental
health in the classroom, time and stress management,
and learning psychology. He is the author of The
Classroom Teacher's Survival Guide.
Forum Topics:
Since 2000, Ron and his wife
Jan have made their home in
Hendersonville. He enjoys a
wide range of activities:
genealogy, golfing, square
dancing, hiking, tennis, blue
grass music etc . Ron is a
volunteer at the Carl Sandburg
Home National Site, giving tours
of the home.
The Forum topics for our regular meetings for the rest of
the year are:
April 28th - Texture
July 28 - Portraits/Candids
October 22 - Dilapidated
February Recap
Note: Weather hampered attendance at a very
informative and useful program. For those who
missed it, this is a much longer than usual recap,
that is continued on p. 5.
Our guests were Curtis Smalling, Western North
Carolina Director of Land Bird Conservation for the
Audubon Society, and bird photographer, Todd Arcos.
Curtis explained there are over 470 bird species in North
Carolina, with 250 species in western North Carolina. Of that
250, 150 are breeding species. The Audubon bird program
has five parts: (1) Putting Forests to Work for Birds identifying the top 10 percent of forests providing habitat for
birds; (2) Sharing our Seas and Shores - identifying and
trying to mitigate coastal development that has disturbed bird
Camera Club of Hendersonville
His "Independent Studies" consists of finding a topic of
interest and researching it for up to a year. Thus the
interest in Old Hendersonville.
March Refreshments
Michael McVean &
Mitch Randall
Photographer of the Month: Lowell Cooper
The Photographer of the Month will feature several of our
new members. Some like Lowell are returning to an
earlier interest in photography.
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The pictures were taken between 1975 and 1980.
His bio:
My interest in photography goes back to when I was in high school
in the the early 1950's. At that time our school had a darkroom and
an old 4 X 5 Speed Graphic camera (the camera belonged to the
principal), and it was used by several of us who acted as the school
photographers. My father had a friend who gave me a Minolta Auto
Press, which was a World War II vintage Japanese press camera
that he acquired during his time as a Marine in the Pacific during
the war (I still have the camera). As soon as possible I built a
darkroom in my parent's garage.
Years later in the early 1970s I had a
darkroom included in the new home
I was having built in order to introduce
my children to the hobby of taking,
developing and printing photos,
mostly black and white work. After the
home with the darkroom was sold,
my photographic endeavors more
recently have been digital photos of
vacation and family, which are
processed by others locally
Old General Store
One of our new neighbors, Phyllis
Procopio, told me about the
Hendersonville Camera Club, and I
decided it was time that I get back
into photography with something
more advanced than the simple point and shoot digital I presently
have, and to learn about digital darkroom processing. I figured the
Club would offer help in pursuing those goals.
I was born in Asheville, but my parents moved to Chattanooga,
Tennessee when I was three years old, and then to Miami when I
was eight years old. I am married to Linda and have three children
and four grandchildren, all of them in Miami. Other than time spent
at Emory University in Atlanta, and the military in Germany, I spent
most of my life in South Florida, until 1997 when we retired and
moved to Brevard. I spent thirty-seven years in the insurance
business as an owner of an insurance agency specializing in
commercial and institutional property and liability insurance. In
August of 2014, we decided to downsize to a smaller home with
less upkeep, and we chose Hendersonville for our home.
A Boy and His Dog
Camera Club of Hendersonville
Bryan's Girlfriend
Old Ironsides
Page 2
Florida Sunset
Halloween
Tip of the Month: Sharpen Photos in Adobe Camera Raw
(ACR)
While many photographers will head straight to Photoshop, Adobe
Camera Raw can be a useful tool.
The amount of sharpening needed will depend on several factors,
including the type of subject and detail to the image resolution and
camera used to take the shot.
Rodeo Cowboy
The first tool is the Amount, which controls the strength of the
effect. For normal capture sharpening set this to 50 or less, but a
greater amount may be needed if processing the raw file is for
direct output for a print or website.
The second slider is the Radius that determines the number of
pixels affected by the sharpening. Next, the Details slider, with
higher amounts such as 40 to 50 enhancing detail in texture and
fine details, while lower values such as 10 to 20 will restrict the
sharpening to more obvious edges in the subject. Finally, there is a
Masking control that allows one to restrict the amount of
Camera Club of Hendersonville
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sharpening in less detailed areas of the image to minimize
noise. For images shot at low ISO settings, one can keep
this setting close to zero, but up to around 50 for images
where noise becomes visible in smooth toned areas.
In the fifth volume Kelby provides new recipes, with the
added benefit of a behind the scenes photo so readers can
see exactly how the shot was done.
This tip is #16 from Chris Rutter, 20 Ways to Get Sharper
Shots This Summer. Digital Camera World, August 2013.
From the 173 Customer Reviews on Amazon, the average
was 4.5 out of 5.
From the Bookshelf
The Photographer's Dictionary
Bokeh
Two recent books that may be of interest to
photographers are Lynsey Addario's Its What I Do: A
Photographers Life of Love and War (Penguin, 2015),
and Scott Kelby's The Digital Photography Book, Part 5:
Photo Recipes (Peachpit Press, 2014).
Addario is a MacArthur "
"Genius" Fellowship recipient
and was part of the team that
won the 2009 Pulitizer Prize for
International Reporting. She
had photographed the Afghan
people and culture in the late
1990s, and after 9/11 she got
the assignment to go back to
Afghanistan. She has covered
almost all of the major wars in
the 21st century, and the book
tells of her headline-making
kidnapping by pro-Qaddafi
forces in the Libyan civil war.
She relates the difficulties of competing in a mostly male
profession, of balancing home life and and her profession,
and of using her fears to create empathy.
The Publishers Weekly Review states: "Highly readable
and thoroughly readable…Addario's memoir brilliantly
succeeds not only as a personal and professional
narrative, but also as an illuminating homage to
photojournalism's role in documenting suffering and
injustice, and its potential to influence public opinion and
official policy."
Derived from the Japanese "to blur", this term is used to
describe the aesthetic quality of the blur in out-of-focus areas
of a picture, or the lens creating them. Smooth, circular, outof-focus highlights are a feature of "good bokeh".
Workshop
Disclaimer: The Camera Club does not endorse or support
the Workshops listed in the Newsletter, but provides the
information for our members only.
Bill and Linda Lane, of Nature's Images, located in
Montpelier, VA will be running five workshops in 2015,
ranging from Spring the the Smoky Mountains, to Fall color in
North Carolina. They can be reached at:
www.lanephotoworkshops.com
From the Editor
The Newsletter is going out early this month, as Judy and I
will be going to Iceland to try to photograph the Northern
Lights. The operative word is "try" as clouds, snow, and high
winds on an photo trip to Iceland two years ago left us with
one pale sighting.
Last, But Not Least
Ron Anderson has provided a linkage with additional
information and an excerpt:
http://theonlinephotographer.typepad.com/
the_online_photographer/2015/02/lynseys-new-book.html
Scott Kelby is editor and
Publisher of Photoshop User
magazine, and the author of
more than 60 books. His The
Digital Photography Book
Series is the top selling digital
photography book of all time.
Kelby relates that in the first
four volumes, the last chapter
is the most popular: "Photo
Recipes to Help You Get the
Shot:". There Kelby shows a
final shot and how he got the
image.
Kelby calls this the "straight to the point, skip the
tecnojargon approach".
The Camera Club of Hendersonville
Our Thanks to Ron Anderson.
Page 4
habitat; (3) Saving Important Areas - 96 have been
identified in North Carolina; (4) Shaping a Healthy Climate
and Clean Energy Sources - one third of bird species are
vulnerable to climate change, moving north as
temperatures rise; (5) Creating Bird Friendly Communities
- in North Carolina 80 percent of the plants are non-native,
and do not provide the necessary food or shelter for birds.
Local Roots is a program in conjunction with nurseries to
provide more native plants.
Hooded Mergansers (Huntington Beach State Park, S.C.)
Kentucky Warbler (Green River)
Curtis noted that bird photographers have a responsibility
to avoid flushing out birds in order to photograph them,
particularly if they are weak from long migrations. A
problem also exists with people playing bird songs or calls
on smartphones or portable devices. Technically a permit
is needed for this. Overuse can affect where birds breed.
Northern Gannett (Huntington Beach State Park, S.C.)
As cameras greatly increase the number of focal points, Todd
relies upon the camera's autofocus mode. He never crops a
photo more than 50 percent, as too much detail is lost.
His website is: toddarcosphotography.com
Long Tailed Duck
(Asheville)
Todd Arcos provides a number of bird pictures for the
Audubon Society. For his specialty, and for wildlife
photography in general, the keys to success are
knowledge and patience. Many birds in North Carolina
have micro-habitats. That is, they return year after year to
a very small area, perhaps a glen or even a snag. Todd
keeps a notebook of sightings and areas; thus he takes
90 percent of his photos from the car.
Long Tailed Duck (Huntington Beach State Park, S.C.)
Among Todd's tips for bird photography, one is to avoid
the golden hours. While important in landscape
photography, its overuse in avian photos results in
unnatural tones that distort birds' true colors.
Camera Club of Hendersonville
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