Click here for Pittwater Camera Club website



Our next meeting on Monday 2nd March 7.30 pm in the Pittwater RSL auditorium is a competition night.

"Landscape / Seascape

- The Golden Hours"

Our judge for the evening is Alan Hitchell.
For a full description of the subject please refer to the Club website under rules and definitions.

Please ensure your correctly sized digital images are forwarded to [email protected] no later than 11.00 pm Saturday 29th February.

" Anything more than 500 yards from the car just isn't photogenic "
Edward Weston

Camera Club Outing Friday 14th February.

Photo by Peter Squires
A successful evening where the rain held off and the racers didn't seem to mind being photographed.
Brian Smith, Trevor, Peter Cooke, Peter Squires, Robyn, Ron Grimes, Brian Halls, Deb, and new members Ruth and Janis showed up for the event.
It was a learning curve for all, and the first time for many at a cycle race.
The ability to get very close to the action (and the racers didn't seem to mind) made lens choices challenging.
Robyn (always looking for a different angle) lying flat on the ground to get the perfect shot showed her true dedication.
A big thanks to Brian Smith for organising this event.

Getting Started with Lightroom
Tomorrow night

Due to popular demand , Mark will be conducting a session on Lightroom processing.
When:
Monday February 24 at 7:30pm in the auditorium at         Pittwater RSL. With a 10-minute break at 8:30 and aiming to finish the session by 9:30pm
 
What’s going to be covered:
The Import function in Lightroom’s Library module,
  • Transferring your photos from your card or camera to your computer using Lightroom,
  • Adding photos already on your computer (or an attached drive) to Lightroom’s,
  • Navigating around lightroom so you can further explore the things you can do with your photos using Lightroom after this session, and
  • A list of resources including further reading, links to online training and videos will be provided.
 
What to bring:
  • You can either just watch or,
  • bring your laptop with lightroom already installed and working and follow along AND bring whatever you need to connect a card with photos on it OR your camera to your laptop ready to transfer files to your laptop,
  • Your knowledge of how to use your laptop, and
  • Pen and paper might be handy too.
 
Disclaimer: While Lightroom looks and works 99% the same on a Windows laptop or Mac laptop, Mark uses Windows and his knowledge of Mac is very limited . Mark's words , not mine!

New Photography YouTube Show


The following email received from Joyce Chan may be of interest to you.
[email protected]
I am getting in contact to bring to your attention a new photography YouTube show which has been in the making for the past 2 years. It’s a free to watch monthly show released on the final Sunday of each month at 4pm. Each show will be around 40 minutes in duration and will consist of a combination of tutorials, equipment reviews, location information, editing tips, as well as some photography related entertainment. We will also be giving away some impressive prizes.

The show is produced on the Isle of Skye in Scotland but we cover locations all over the world as we follow professional photographers going about their business.

The show is aimed at all levels of photographer, with some of our features focusing on more basic skills and others being more advanced.

This is a brand new show for 2020 and we are trying to get the word out, so please help us by forwarding details to the members of your camera club.

We hope you enjoy watching the shows - the first of which is available now.

www.YouTube.com/c/PhotographyOnline

Many thanks for your time and I wish you all the best in 2020.

The Art of Wildlife Photography - FREE Ebook

I am pleased to announce the release of my first ever Ebook 'The Art of Wildlife Photography.' This Ebook contains lots of useful information to help photographers achieve better wildlife images.
The good news is that it is absolutely FREE!
You can download the book:
wildnaturephotoexpeditions.com/free-ebook-download/

I hope you enjoy reading it and find the tips and techniques useful : - ))
The Milky Way season is here…

So here you have our updated 2020 Milky Way guide:
 
Milky Way Photography: The Definitive Guide (2020)
Inside, you’ll find everything you need to take stunning Milky Way photos:
  • Milky Way viewing calendar 2020
  • How to find a powerful Milky Way location
  • The 3 crucial tips you should know before you start planning the Milky Way
  • How to plan your Milky Way photo ideas step by step
  • All the gear you need to successfully photograph the Milky Way
  • How to photograph the Milky Way step by step
  • How to post-process the Milky Way RAWs (with these 5 great free tutorials)
  • 10 inspiring Milky Way pictures
Happy Milky Way season!

The Mono Awards is looking for the best Black and White photography from Australia and New Zealand to share in cash and prizes worth over $12,000. 
EARLY BIRD CLOSES SUNDAY 8 MARCH.

https://australianphotography.cmail20.com/t/ViewEmail/i/8AB97F4B9B3B551D2540EF23F30FEDED/C899D1BEBACDB67E44D0DD5392A9C75A

New Eastway Webinar on YouTube

Gee, I can ramble on! While away on a family holiday in January, Phase One and Drew Altdoerffer released a little YouTube video where Drew and I chew the fat about lots of different photography subjects. If you'd like to take a look or listen, you'll find it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7tyTUKmj5p0

Topaz Labs
Ongoing Product Value and Paid Upgrades

Hello everyone!
If we haven’t already been acquainted, I’m Eric, CEO of Topaz Labs. I hope you’re off to a great start in 2020. I have an announcement that may seem like bad news at first, but will end up being good news in the long run:
Starting in August 2020, we will charge for product upgrades to DeNoise AI, Sharpen AI, Gigapixel AI, and Mask AI.
Every company says that they value their customers. When we started Topaz Labs many years ago, we tried hard to figure out ways to show this through actions instead of just words. One of the ways we did this was by offering free major upgrades for all of our products. Conceptually, this felt really good to us; we loved the idea of acting differently than faceless corporations by giving ongoing value for free instead of charging for every little thing.
Within the last few years, though, we started to realize something. Product development and research is expensive! It turns out that if we can only earn money by releasing new products, there’s a very powerful internal incentive to only do that. Despite our best intentions, we found that we weren’t focusing as much as we wanted on improving our existing products. We ended up with several different products that did similar things, which caused confusion about which tool to use. Although it started out with good intentions, our free upgrade policy ultimately prevented us from delivering the best possible products to you.
Make no mistake about it: this situation was 100% our fault. We were not thoughtful enough about aligning our pricing structure with continuous improvement of our products. Since realizing this, we took some major steps to improve in 2019:
  1. Consolidated all of our offerings into a single product per category (noise reduction, sharpening, effect creation, etc.)
  2. Massively shifted our internal goals to prioritize improving existing products over releasing new ones
  3. Stopped advertising free upgrades as a policy
Despite not advertising it anymore, in 2019 alone we were proud to give away over $8M worth of claimed free upgrades to major new products like DeNoise 6 => DeNoise AI, InFocus => Sharpen AI, Adjust 6 => Adjust AI, and Studio 2. We’ve already seen a major improvement in the usefulness and experience of our products, and we’re excited to continue down this path in 2020 and beyond.
The next step is to actually move to paid upgrades to finally align our pricing policy with how we want to build products as a company. Basically: it’s our fault, yet I’m asking you to lock arms with us and walk through this phase of our development by accepting this change. I know it’s a lot to ask for, but I hope you can agree that this path really is best for continued improvements to the products that we hope you’ve grown to rely upon.
Here’s how it will work:
Upgrade license renewals
  • After buying a product for the first time, you’ll receive 1 year of free major + minor upgrades from your date of purchase.
  • After your first year of free upgrades is complete, you can buy another year at any time in the future - for any single product for $49.99. If you own multiple products, you can activate a year of account-wide upgrades for $99.99.
  • Only DeNoise, Sharpen, Gigapixel, and Mask will require an upgrade license in 2020. Other products remain under the old policy.
We want you to own your software instead of having to pay to keep accessing it. Once you buy one of our products, you can keep using your purchased version as long as you want regardless of upgrade status. We’re really proud that some of you have continued to trust our products for over a decade after buying it once, and we’d love for this to continue.
Similarly, you should also be able to choose when to upgrade and not be penalized for it. If you don’t think a certain upgrade is worth it, don’t renew your upgrade license just yet. Wait until it actually includes something you want to pay for. This also incentivizes us to make sure that the improvements we do implement are useful enough for you to upgrade.
ExampleAs an example, let’s say you buy Gigapixel AI for the first time today (2/13/2020), so you receive free upgrades to Gigapixel AI until 2/13/2021.
We then release Gigapixel v4.5 in March, v5 in May, v5.1 in August, and v5.2 in December 2020. You receive all these upgrades for free as part of your initial 1-year upgrade license.
Now imagine we release Gigapixel v5.3 in May 2021 and you decide it’s not worth it. Even though your upgrade license has expired, you can continue using Gigapixel v5.2 (your last owned version) for as long as you like.
Gigapixel v5.3 in May 2021 has a feature you really want, so you purchase an upgrade then. You receive Gigapixel v5.3 and another year of free upgrades starting from the time you purchased the upgrade until May 2022.
Existing customersFor the listed products above, existing customers have an upgrade license starting from a year since they purchased. For example, if you bought DeNoise AI in November 2019, your upgrade license will last until November 2020.
That said, we thought it’d be unfair to immediately expire licenses for people that have purchased over a year ago. So for anyone in this situation, we’re extending a minimum 6 months of upgrade licenses. Even if you first bought our products years ago, the earliest you’d possibly need to pay for an upgrade is in August 2020.
Starting soon, you’ll be able to see the remaining time on your upgrade licenses in your Account.
Why?I know this is a major shift. We’ve offered free upgrades for so long that it’s become part of what we’re known for. I guess this change all comes down to a single core idea: to be truly useful to you, we believe we should be offering fewer products that go deeper rather than a buffet of shallow products.
In other words, we don’t want to offer you novelties that you’ll stop using after a month. Instead, if you buy DeNoise AI, we want to help you handle noise reduction forever through our software. This means constantly evaluating and adding the most promising cutting-edge noise reduction techniques, relentlessly improving integration with your workflow, and continually adding major new functionality like batch processing (just released!) and selections. You shouldn’t have to worry about noise reduction ever again… or at the very least, you should be able to rely on us to worry about it for you. Paid upgrades are necessary for us to support this kind of deep focus.
Again, this was not a quick or easy decision to make, but we think it’s a necessary one in order for us to deliver massive value for you in the future. All I ask of you is that you give us a chance to prove this through our product improvements in 2020 and beyond.
Thanks so much,
Eric Yang
CEO, Topaz Labs
Facebook
Not a member of our Facebook page yet? You are encouraged to join - this is the place to get lots of tips, advice and help, to see what other members are up to and  be able to stay in touch between meetings.
Just follow this link.
 www.facebook.com/groups/pittcameraclub/

Digital Image Titling

PLEASE ensure your digital images are TITLED and include your FULL NAME as per the instructions on our website.
Use only lower case characters with no spaces. Use underscore in place of spaces.
eg:  the_shearers_ben_jones.jpg
All digital images are to be sent to [email protected] no later than 11.00pm on Saturday night (2 days before the competition).

FCC Newsletter February

The latest edition of the FCC ( Federation of Camera Clubs) NSW newsletter is available by following the link

fccnsw.myphotoclub.com.au/wp-content/uploads/sites/143/2020/02/FCC-F-February-2020-1.pdf

Camera Gear Sales

If anyone has camera gear or magazines or anything photographically related they would like to sell/donate please contact Bill with details and we can list them in the newsletter.
[email protected]
Fuji X100S for sale  $500-00
Mint condition
This classic X series camera is great for street, travel and landscape photography.
In original packaging it includes many optional extras.
- Fuji lens hood
- Filter mount
- 3 batteries
- Battery charger, all cables and software
- A book "Mastering the Fuji X100S" valued at $50.00
Selling well below second hand prices.
Contact John Taylor 0418 670 501
The Mobile Photography Awards were founded in 2011 to recognize and celebrate the talent and imagery of the mobile photo & art communities. Alongside the annual competition (October-December), it produces themed exhibits with international open calls throughout the year.
If it’s true what Henri Cartier-Bresson says, that our first 10,000 photos will be our worst, then mobile photography has given people an historic opportunity to quickly get past 10,001. The MPA is a showcase for photographers and artists who have embraced this decisive moment.
The 9th Annual awards have been announced and you can see the full list of winners and runners up by following the attached link.
mobilephotoawards.com/9th-annual-mpa-winners-honorable-mentions/
There are many awe inspiring images including one from our very own Joe Mills - "Sydney Harbour Bridge from Bus Window during Storm" , in the Water / Snow / Ice section.
A great effort when you consider he is mixing it with the best in the world!
Photo by Joe Mills

NiSi Switch 100mm Filter Holder

WHEN EDITING PHOTOGRAPHS in Lightroom, Photoshop or Capture One, do you find yourself using the graduated filter (or equivalent)?
And do you find yourself using two different graduated filters from time to time, at different angles?
For instance, you might darken down the sky with the first graduated filter, then darken down the foreground next, leaving the middle of the image lighter and brighter.
You can also do this 'in-camera' with graduated neutral density filters, placing two filters into the holder, one 'upside down'. And the amount and area of darkening can be adjusted by sliding the filters up and down.
The only downside of using a filter is that its straight edge doesn't account for bumps in the landscape, like trees or mountains that break the horizontal horizon.
But what happens if you need to angle one of the graduated filters? No trouble in Photoshop or Lightroom, but what can you do when you're using filters on a camera?
Hand-holding the filters is one answer, but now NiSi has a better one!
The NiSi Switch 100mm Filter Holder allows two filters to be rotated together or independently from each other. It’s designed for photographers who need graduated ND filters positioned at different angles, plus allows them to be rotated independently and smoothly.
The NiSi Switch allows smooth 360 degrees rotation, but also has a locking screw to fix the back holder into position.
The holder has no vignetting, even with a 16mm ultra wide-angle lens on a full-frame sensor.
The NiSi Switch is compatible with existing 100mm NiSi filters and works with the 82 mm main adaptor, included in the following NiSi kits: V6/V5PRO/V5. So, if you are an existing NiSi user, you can just order the Switch as an additional filter holder to add to your kit.
Price is expected to be $159 and you can purchase directly from NiSi – https://nisifilters.com.au/product/nisi-switch-100mm-filter-holder/.

iPhone Photography evening
with Pieter de Vries

$45 per person
Wednesday, February 26th
Newport Bowling Club
7pm until 9pm
There will be time for questions afterwards.
Please arrive earlier. The club will be open and the bar staffed.
The night's session will cover:
• Explain and adjust the correct iPhone camera settings
• Discovering the hidden camera features of the iPhone
• Shooting perfect portraits
• Capturing stunning landscapes
• Shooting better panoramas
• Macro - how to capture giant close ups
• How to use the available light to create stunning images

And featuring an introduction to iPhone Video
• How to shoot the mix of clips that will make a fun edit
• How to avoid the most common mistakes
• Time-lapse Tips
• Effective SlowMo ideas

Wildlife, Reptiles and Frogs - Autumn Edition Sunday 3 May 2020

A chance to join Mark Rayner for a very special autumn workshop with a fresh selection of Frogs, Reptiles and other cuddly critters.
This is a special opportunity (for 2020) to see and photograph some amazing reptiles, frogs, birds and mammals. Some of these have not been presented at a workshop before.
Many are all but impossible to photograph in the wild without a BBC Wildlife budget.
Numbers are very limited so get in quickly!
madmimi.com/p/f7c4401?pact=265642-156976645-10839720100-f26eb698146a474b5ae91208c44291a8baeec016

A COLLECTION OF INSPIRING SPEAKERS AND EDUCATIONAL WORKSHOPS

Bring your curiosity and we'll supply cutting-edge Nikon products, a range of inspiring speakers and educational workshops from industry-leading creatives.
mynikonlife.com.au/evolve/

Interactive experiences, workshops and events to take your photography to the next level. Try some of the latest gear, be inspired and connect to a community of like-minded people.

www.canon.com.au/collective?utm_campaign=20200220%20CCI%20Events%20and%20Workshops%2023&utm_medium=email&utm_source=Eloqua&utm_content=20200219%20CCI%20Events%20and%20Workshops%20Vol.%2023%20NSW
Purchase a LaCie 2big and receive a complimentary
500GB Portable SSD USB-C valued at $179
2big RAID 
Professional RAID Made Easy
  • Up to 440MB/s transfer speed
  • RAID 0/1 for speed/protection
  • Thunderbolt 3, USB-C & USB3.0 Connectivity
  • Available in 4TB, 8TB & 16TB
  • Starts from $999.00
2big Dock Thunderbolt3 
It is the Heartbeat of Your Workflow
Don't forget - Momento offer a 30% discount to our financial members off their first order then all subsequent orders will receive an automatic 10% discount.
Hop over to ​http://www.momentopro.com.au/ to sign up.
If you have any items of interest that you would like to share with your fellow members please email Bill at [email protected].

                      Other bits and pieces which should be of interest.


Sydney International Exhibition of Photography  www.siep.org.au  

Len Metcalf  lensschool.com

Adam Williams ( for inspiration and workshops)  www.australianphotographer.com

Luke Tscharke, (for great astrophotography tips and workshops)  luketscharke.com

Pamela Pauline ( local fine art photographic artist ) www.pamelapauline.com

Peter Coulson  (inspiration for fashion photography, great studio lighting and workshops)
 www.peter-coulson.com.au

Greg Benz Photography for tutorials and newsletter  www.gregbenzphotography.com   

Alfonso Calero ( for travel photography workshops)   www.alfonso.com.au/sydney-photography-courses/
 
Mark Galer, Adobe Ambassador  www.markgaler.com

Photoshop Cafe ( loads of free tutorials )  photoshopcafe.com

Phlearn (easy to follow tutorials, many of them are free, you don't have to subscribe ) www.phlearn.com

www.beckhamdigital.com.au  (go to more , then newsletter) for some awesome tuitions. Thanks Alan for this one!

For a different perspective and inspiring photography, have a look at Erika Zolli Photography  www.erikazolli.it

Just click on the links or google any of the above for more information.


Other items of interest are also being posted directly to our Facebook page, so please like us and share with your friends.