Face to face meeting of the Critique SIG on 20th September 2022

We wanted to give all members  a chance to benefit from a critique evening before the first PDI competition of the season (final image submission date October 7th for October 17th competition) – consequently we have organized a meeting for Tuesday 20th September at the OLC from 8pm to 10pm

There will be a small charge to cover the cost of the room rental – we expect it to be either £4.00 or £5.00 depending on numbers and the room we are assigned. We should be able to run this at this cost if we have at least 9 attendees and the maximum will be 12 members.

Background to this SIG meeting

As background, the format of these evenings is that everyone is asked to bring up to three images they would like to discuss on a stick (or email 24 hours in advance). Please name these images 1-initials, 2-initials and 3-initials using your own initials.

The format should be the 1600 by 1200 pixels needed for club submissions (see the BCC website blog for resizing instructions using Adobe software – if you use other resizing packages please ask for help via one of the club’s FB groups).

During the meeting, we will view the images in order (i.e. all the 1s, then all the 2s etc.) with a goal to complete at least all the 1s and 2s – we may not complete the third set. The images will be displayed in Adobe Lightroom and the author will be asked to say a very few words about what she/he was hoping to achieve with the image.

We will discuss the impression given by the image and whether there are any options that might make the image better reflect the author’s intent; if these involve simple post-processing, a Lightroom expert (probably Jon Sawyer) will roughly demonstrate what might be achieved.

Please note that this is NOT a Lightroom class and we will not be discussing the “how” of Lightroom technique – just showing “what might be achieved”.

The history of this group is that many images refined after discussion at a face-to-face evening (or discussed on the FB Group) go on to do well in competition – often because issues that a judge might make suggestions about have been addressed in advance.

However, it is not just about competition entries, a particular “fun” thing about these evenings is seeing quite a wide range of images get refined and getting a sense of what critique and post-processing can do to help an image better achieve what the author intended.

How to sign up

To sign up, please send an email ASAP to us here. We will collect cash on the night for the room rental. We know this is short notice and we will cancel the event if there are insufficient people signing up but hopefully that will not be the case – in the past, these evenings were fully booked very shortly after they were advertised. We will be announcing this on Monday at the club night on the 12th,  so if you see this over the weekend, please take advantage of this early booking opportunity!!