MONTHLY CHALLENGES
Current and past Challenge images can be seen at Amersham Beyond Group on Flickr.
For APS Members only, the images are also available for viewing and commenting on Facebook here.
We enjoyed the current Challenge images which are;
#47 OUT OF THIS WORLD
#48 TONDO
… and the latest Challenge;
#49 CHEER UP!
Here, the aim is to evoke a positive, uplifting, emotional feeling in the viewer. Love, joy, happiness, humour, excitement, triumph, tenderness, hope etc.
Feel free to include a caption within the image if it helps to tell a story.
Bob’s Tondo images had made good use of the Tiny Planets app for iOS (99p + 99p for essential extras) which has proved to be very quick and flexible at producing planets and rabbit holes (the opposite of a planet) and also has the invaluable benefit of being able to produce instantaneous tiny planet thumbnails of every image in your Photos album to help identify good candidates for further work. For Android there are alternative apps (recommendations?). For most control and quality the more traditional method of producing Tiny Planets in Photoshop with the Polar Co-ordinates filter was described in last month’s notes.
Tip: The Tiny Planets app does not output images at full resolution by default but there is a setting for this somewhat hidden at the far right of the menu bar.
One of my Out of this World images was inspired by the Solid Light installation currently at Tate Modern until April 2025. Here, planes of light are projected through a misty atmosphere with which visitors interact to create fascinating images of light and shadow. I was also experimenting to see whether a single line could evoke an emotion.
Laurie was inspired by the work of a Newlyn artist Sir Terry Frost with his colourful abstract of a smile (?) which led neatly on to the next Challenge…
The next Challenge will be;
#50 PRIMARY COLOURS
To create an image which predominantly features one or more bold saturated colours. Ideally these will be strong graphical compositions using the primary colours of red, yellow and blue although others are not forbidden.
We tend to avoid strong colours in most club photography apart from the cliché of a key figure wearing red, so this is an opportunity to go bold. I was surprised at the strength of colour that my printer achieved with a recent submission based on Mondrian’s geometric art but using close-ups of cars.
You don’t have to accept the taken colours in an image. They can be easily changed in a photo editor. In Photoshop, select the area and modify it with Image>Adjustments>Hue/Saturation then using the Hue, Saturation and Lightness sliders to achieve the required result. The Colorize option is also available but beware it will colour the entire selection including highlights and shadows that you might not want.
If you want pure primary colours the RGB values are - Red:255,0,0 Blue:0,0,255 and Yellow 255,255,0
BACK OF BEYOND DIARIES
Windows 11. My Christmas project was a clean installation of Windows 11 (sad, I know). The actual installation was almost trivial, taking about half an hour using the Media Creation Tool available online. Re-installing the many programs took several days on and off. I always make notes and the previous learning lessons were to create a detailed inventory of everything previously installed and all the license keys using Belarc Advisor Free. I did not touch the D: data disk although I had good backups anyway but an image of the boot disk C: proved to be very useful to recover bits and pieces such as colour profiles and stored settings that were not backed up and saved much time to re-create.
The other reason to do this clean install was to finally eliminate software from the cause of periodic and catastrophic (can’t find Windows) crashes of my PC roughly monthly since new. Although easily recovered (power off and wait five minutes) the root cause would seem to be hardware but might always be software. Chillblast have committed to take it back if this clean install does not fix the problem. No crashes … yet.
Of course an upgrade rather than a clean install would have been much quicker but it’s a good policy anyway to do a wipe-and-refresh after a few years (4 years in my case) to get rid of accumulated cruft.
Interestingly, this expensive fast PC is significantly slower with Windows 11.
Backups. This is a perennial subject and everyone will have their own solution. It’s only when you have a catastrophe that you find out if your backups are robust. As I never tire of saying – if you don’t have a good backup you WILL lose all your data. It’s just a matter of when.
I use a combination of multiple external disk drives (big and cheap), OneDrive cloud storage (slow but high capacity and spectacular value with Microsoft Office/365) and a local NAS box. The software I use is Ashampoo Backup Pro (cheap when on offer and reliable for versioning ie it keeps twice-daily copies of changing data so accidental over-writes are recoverable) and SyncBack Free for mirroring vast quantities of images quickly.
iPhone Image Storage. Maybe it’s me but I find the lack of good filing system for the iPhone a nightmare. My solution is to remove and delete all images from the phone after a few months. On my desktop storage system the images are organised into a hierarchy of simple folders by date and event. A few key images are also moved into folders in OneDrive to be available when offline.
Quick Searching. Windows Search continues to disappoint. Although I have a robust hierarchical filing system I seem to rely more and more on Everything search which is a small, free, portable app which finds any filename on my PC in an instant. Remarkably it can index a million filenames in a minute and only needs to do this once.
NEXT MEETING
The meeting planned for February is cancelled.
The next meeting is on Thursday 6th March 2025 in the Drake Hall at the Community Centre.
Cheers, Steve.