Well folks… Thank YOU!!!
I truly appreciate the e-mails lately and honestly… it has renewed my faith that others out there are simply enjoying photography as I do. I appreciate the thoughts and advice and you have reaffirmed that we truly do have an amazing local photographic community.
On other notes though (and skipping ahead from this last issue) I am still working on the new web site for our local camera club.
John had mentioned last summer that running the club was taking up way too much time and like most, he has his hands full doing many other things. I bumped into him recently at the Pool and Fitness center and I mentioned I’d love to help out, later on realizing that my offer to assist was going to take on more than I knew.
Ha… but I am looking forward to it and the adventure ahead.
A bit of a backgrounder on this though before I go into it more:
A while back I was lucky enough to bump into a few people around town who were out shooting with their cameras. Each and every time I’d meet someone we’d always talk about forming a little group of locals who were interested in photography. It never really materialized, maybe because we had just met for the first time, maybe because some of us were not as involved with it as others, maybe because I never got off my butt to do so, who knows… but I kept on meeting new people and the same topics kept coming up.
Soon after I bumped into a local “kid” who was out dirt biking for the day. I asked the group of kids dirt biking if I could practice shooting them in the sand pits and this guy comes up, quietly and we start talking about the cameras and such. ”Joel” has that eye that I can only dream of, I’m better with the tech side of things… Hmm…
So… we start shooting together, learning about off-camera lighting, experimenting and having fun teaching each other. Joel led the way on the Internet for our little group creating a challenge site where we could try things out and post our results on Flickr (3Day Challenge). The next thing I know, Chris and then Bruce join in and we have our own little group that is not really into the class thing but hands on shooting things in my living room.
In the mean time, John has managed to pull together over two dozen others in town and formed the local photo club. Wow… we didn’t even know about it at the time and our little group was growing day by day on the opposite side of the coin.
So even though we had basically two small groups meeting about photography in town, we didn’t really know what each other was doing. I then decided to join up Dryden in the Scott Kelby’s Worldwide Photo Walk this past summer and knew that to get more involved I’d better go to the other club meetings. Sure enough… I meet Derek, Ed, Doug and a few others and our Photo Walk got a bit bigger. Actually, so did our little get togethers… with Derek coming along (and Doug and Ed expressing interest) and lighting up the yard and house with the rest of us.
Going to the local Photo Club meeting was a great experience and a tremendous realization that there were a LOT of people in town and the surrounding area interested in Photography. I kept thinking to myself… how do we get all these people together, those who are Internet savy, those who have just bought their first computer to use these new fangled digital cameras, those who love the classroom style learning to those who avoid it with a passion?
John had put together an amazing group of people whom were just doing that… from all walks of life, sitting in a meeting room sharing and learning to getting out on “adventures”. Yep… now how to take it a bit further?
So… he had my interest big time… how to get our group involved with the others and how to get the others involved with our group? How do we get those who are just getting into Photography involved with those with experience in it? How do we take our enthusiasm and learn from experience?
With that, after I had met John again at the Pool and Fitness Center and he asked me if I was willing to help with the club, he forwarded all the locals e-mails and sent out a note last month telling everyone I’d be on contact with them soon. He also handed over a disc of notes and such that I’m going through to try and figure out what all has been accomplished and what the plans were for the upcoming year for the group. I had an e-mail all ready to go out and then decided to merge a partition on my second hard drive… crashing the entire computer. Luckily enough I had bought the HP MediaSmart 470 Server to make daily backups of my computers on (3.5 terabytes of storage)…
Sure enough, the backups will not work, the Windows Home Server 2003 backup software has corrupted the files and is unable to reformat the hard drives… BAM… all that secure information and backups were lost. Well… sort of Yes… I’m hacking into the files to retrieve what I can, and crossing my fingers that my outlook files (with all my subscriptions and passwords) are more recent than my manual backups from last month.
I should have the e-mails back this week and will be sending out one ASAP.
In the meantime;
I do have a web site domain name ready to go and will be setting up another copy of Invision Power Board for the group to use to communicate here on the web. I’ve also set up a Facebook group (Dryden Photo Club) for anyone on Facebook as well as I have have posted some information to our local Flickr group (Northwestern Ontario Photography). The name for the new site will be www.nwophoto.info and will be FREE to anyone interested in Photography in our area and will include a calendar, discussion forums, gallery, blogs and much more.
Stay tuned… hoping that we can get a meeting up and running to find out what people would like out of the club, where they would like to meet, what they would like to learn and do… and hopefully we can do it on the first week of February at the Centre again.
So… again… Thank you all for enjoying photography as much or moreso than I do
Look forward to seeing you out with a camera in hand soon
by admin
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