Audio/Visual Night brings the season to a close

A/V NIGHT

Tomorrow night we have the last members' night of the 2018/19 season, and hope to finish with a really fun evening. As you may have seen from the website and the Facebook page, we have set two summer challenges - one of which is to prepare an A/V presentation.

A/V has been a recognised genre of photography for some time, although not something we have explored in any depth at the club. It has been something of a niche for years, but modern technology that almost all of us have at our disposal makes it surprisingly easy to do. Almost all of our guest speakers this year have shown some form of A/V in their talks, because it's a great way to show off images!

David Pickford, who gave us a talk a few weeks ago, has a DPAGB award for his A/V work - and the PAGB describe the 'rules' as follows: -

An Audio Visual production submitted for a PAGB Award should predominantly consist of sequences of still photographic images, most of such photographs being the original work of the applicant, together with an accompanying synchronised sound track. The use of third party images, animated graphics, video clips or other visual material, whilst not excluded, should be limited and should be appropriate to the production.

Now - we aren't going to start dictating hard and fast rules - this project is meant to be fun, but I thought it would help to understand the idea of what makes a typical A/V.

Iain McLachlan is going to give us a demonstration of how to prepare an A/V in Photoshop CC, a programme that a lot of us use. In the second part of the evening, I will show you some examples of A/Vs and one or two other ways they can be made - using programmes that almost everyone has available to them, even if you don't have Photoshop!

I believe Iain is going to demonstrate how he would turn his winning Main Project entry into an A/V.

Over the summer months, we'd like everyone to consider having a go at putting one together. No real rules as such, just have fun. We'll spend a members' night at the start of next season watching them, so the more people that get involved the better it will be! We have the technology to play back pretty much any kind of movie file, so don't worry about formats etc, and also don't worry about musical copyright - there will be no unauthorised publication of anything, this is solely for fun.

As mentioned last week, we have at least three summer outings to look forward to, so why not use one of them as an opportunity to have a go at an A/V?

SEASONS

We have also set a second project - a sort of replacement for the President's 12. It seemed that a number of people enjoyed the president's 12 over the summer, but when we got into the 'competition season' it played second fiddle a bit, and the number of images submitted waned significantly. This year, therefore, the topic is simpler - SEASONS. All we ask is that you submit a presentation of seasons. This can be four images depicting Summer, Autumn, Winter and Spring, or a single image, 12 images, an A/V presentation - ANYTHING YOU WANT. Be as creative as you possibly can, and lets see how diverse a range of interpretations of the seasons we have come Spring 2020. The plan is to show the results on the 17th March 2020, so the only 'rule' is to have your submission in no later than the 10th March 2020.

A quick google search of 'four seasons photography' will give you a mountain of inspiration - be imaginative, be creative and have fun!

We look forward to seeing as many people at the club tomorrow as possible to bring the curtain down on a great season.