Charter Oak Photo Blog

The March Slide-O-Gram is now available; just click the link below.

March 2010 Slide-O-Gram

Rick Slide-O-Gram

The Specified Topic for the March competition is Occupations (image that illustrates a recognizable occupation – e.g., showing people at work or “tools” of the job, etc).

Rick General Competition Entries

On Monday, March 22nd, Ron Wybranowski will be presenting his ‘Dream It! Plan It! Do It! – Photographing the National Parks’ show at Charter Oak’s general meeting at the Elmwood Community Church, 26 Newington Road, West Hartford, CT.  The meeting will begin at 7:15 P.M.

Ron’s presentation includes a short slideshow from the “familiar tripod holes,” a “how to” section about planning a photo trip of from 3 – 30 days, and a closing slideshow of his favorite National Park images, many of which are from “unfamiliar” tripod holes.”

Ron has been a guest presenter at several local camera clubs. His shows have included:  “The Natural Beauty of the Southwest”,  “How to Create Your Own Coffee Table Book”, and “The Great Smoky Mountains, The Blue Ridge Parkway and the Sunrise Highway”.

Ron describes himself as a “serious amateur” photographer who likes to share his love of photography with others. His primary focus is on nature photography with the goal of capturing extraordinary images of the beautiful flowers, birds, animals and scenery that surround us all.

Some of Ron’s favorite subjects are the flowers in the gardens of Stevens-Coolidge Place in North Andover, MA, at the Bridge of Flowers in Shelbourne Falls, MA and in his patio garden.

Ron has traveled extensively to many National Parks, particularly those in the West.  His favorites are Grand Tetons in the fall, Arches and Canyonlands in the spring, and Zion and Grand Staircase-Escalante anytime he can get there.

Rick News

I’ve been working with Paul-James Jones (developer of the Club’s competition software) over the last couple of months to implement a number of enhancements to the software.  While not all of the improvements are in the eUpload software, here are three that you may see.

• Once this update to the software is installed on your machine, the eUpdate program that is installed on your machine along with eUpload will automatically download and install future updates to the program when it is run.
• The eUpload software will now allow you to request a critique of your image.  This will alert whoever is doing the scoring competition night to ask the judges for feedback so you don’t have to.  Until we see how often this is used, please request only one critique per person.  And, of course, this won’t help all you folks in Florida all that much! 
• I now have the ability to lock out the FTP site once the deadline for submission is reached, so you may see a message stating that you’re locked out.

What this means for you now is that you will need to install the new software manually as you did originally.  I’m not quite sure what will happen if you don’t update, but I don’t think it will be pretty so please take a minute to contact me for the new program if I don’t reach out to you first.  If you don’t have time to update before the March competition, please follow the procedure for submitting your images via email and I’ll take care of it for you.

Rick General

The Club has made many changes over the last couple of years including implementing new competition software and expanding our web presence with the creation of a new blog and forum.  In addition, the Club enters several outside competitions throughout the year.  As you can imagine, all of these efforts take some time to put together and maintain and we could certainly use some more help.  If you have an interest in helping with any of these areas, please let me or any of the other Board members know – we’d sure appreciate it!

Rick General

Charter Oak finished 4th overall in Class A in the Pictorial section of the Winter NECCC competition and 3rd overall in the Nature section.  Individual honors went to Ed Rosenthal who tied for 2nd place in Pictorial with 24 points for his image Owl Eyes, Audrey Weigold who received an HM in Nature with 24 points for her image Female Tree Swallow Feeding Her Young, and Laura Bryg who received an HM with 24 points for her image Great Egret Chicks Fighting for Lunch.

Congratulations to Ed, Audrey, and Laura for the great results!

Rick General Competition Results

Charter Oak finished first in black and white and second in color in the NECCC Winter print competition.  Norma Zackor took first place in black and white with 22 points for “Cowboys in the Dust” and John Murphy received an honorable mention with 19 points for ”Glen Canyon #2.”   As our results reflect, the individual scores were remarkably low, with 22 being the highest score given in any category.

acarey General Competition Results

As I mentioned in an earlier post, we are starting to receive automated registrations for the forum so we’ve had to resort to turning on the visual confirmation (sample below) to try and stem the tide.  Some of the character strings can be hard to make out so you may have to refresh it a couple of times before finding one to enter.  If you find you can’t get it to work for you, let me know and we’ll figure something out.

Rick Forum News

There are many people that haven’t been exposed to forums in the past and have a hard time with the fact that you need to actually visit the site from time to time to keep up to date with new posts. As with the blog though, there are ways to have notifications sent directly to you. You can set it up so you’re notified whenever there are replies to a particular post or whenever there is a post to any forum you’re interested in.

For example, if you want to be notified any time there is post in the Monochrome Critique forum, you would enter the forum and click on the Subscribe forum link at the bottom of the page as shown below.

If you want to subscribe to a particular post so you receive an email whenever someone adds a reply, from within the post click on the Subscribe topic link at the bottom of the post as shown below.

In both cases, once you subscribe, the link changes to Unsubscribe so you can stop receiving emails on the topic or forum whenever you want to.  There is also a Manage Subscriptions tab in the User Control Panel where you can do wholesale changes to your subscriptions rather than unsubscribing to one topic or forum at a time.

Rick General Forum Tip

Beginning this month, the monthly competition results will now be published on the Charter Oak forum in the Competition Results forum under COPS Community.  This forum is only available for viewing by COPS members.  You must be a registered user to access this forum – it will not even appear if you’re not registered. Please let me know if you have any issues accessing this forum.

The forum is available at:  www.charteroakphotos.com/forums or by clicking on the Forum button is the menu at the top of this blog.

Rick General Competition Results