Eastern Maine Camera Club

You read it right, the 2019-2020 Camera Club Season is upon us.  Please read this seasons Welcome Letter (below) from our President, Liz Champeon.  If you're interested in joining us this year here's a link to the membership form you'll need.  Fill it out and mail it in, or bring it to the first meeting.   

Click here for the Membership Form

As always, if you have questions, use this link to the contact us form to contact us!

Use this link to download a pdf copy of the letter.  

The Bangor State Fair Photo Contest has wrapped up  for 2019.  If you'd like to see the results you can find them here: 

2019 Bangor State Fair Photo Contest Winner

We had a great turnout this year in our new venue; 237 entries!  Thank you all for participating! 

It’s time to prepare your photos for the 2019 Photo Contest and Exhibit at the Bangor State Fair! The official rules can be downloaded from the fair’s web site at the following address:

2019 Photo Contest Rules, Entry Form and Photo Tickets

More information regarding contests can be found on the fair’s web site at the following address:

http://www.bangorstatefair.com/contestspremiums

Eastern Maine Camera Club members will be available to accept entries at the South East Entry of the Cross Insurance Center on Monday, July 22nd from 5:30 PM to 7:30 PM. There will be signs to guide you. You can also mail your entries, details for that can be found in the Contest Rules (link above). 

Every year we regretfully end up turning some entries away so please do take the time to read the rules.  The most common reason for photos being turned away is improper matting or size.  It’s really important for your photos to be matted according to the rules. Proper matting will help protect your images from damage, and facilitate the way we hang the photos. 

Photo tickets are very important and often misunderstood. We often have over 200 photos to process in one evening. This identifying system allows us to judge the photos anonymously, then quickly pull down the ticket for display, so the photographer can be recognized, without marking up your image or matt. 

Unfortunately tickets can sometimes fall off, making it impossible for us to know who the photo belongs too.  For that reason, your name and address must be on the back of the photo prior to entry in addition to the tickets mentioned above.  Missing this step causes a significant delay for everyone.

I’ve given you some key points but this is no substitute for reading the entire rules.  Please read the entire rules to help us make this an enjoyable experience for everyone.  I’ll post the link again so you don’t even have to scroll back up. 

2019 Photo Contest Rules, Entry Form and Photo Tickets

We at Eastern Maine Camera Club will do our best to answer any question and help you in any way we can.  You can reach us via email at: info@easternmainecameraclub.org. 

Now, in closing here’s a look at the adult categories for this year’s contest:

1. People

2. Children

3. Nature—the “hand of man” cannot be evident in the picture.

4. Animals

5. Flowers

6. Open—Any subject matter in good taste.

7. Maine—Photos that symbolize Maine and were taken in Maine.

8. Panoramas— Subject matter is completely open, but this category will pose a unique challenge. You may create a panoramic image, either horizontal or vertical, of any dimensions, up to a maximum width or height of 40 inches, but the challenging part is, the total image area, Height X Width, must not exceed 320 inches (the area of a standard 16 X 20 print). This means you will have to carefully plan your photo's composition so the image will fit within an aspect ratio that conforms to the above width and area, rather than width and height. Please study the following description of what we will consider an acceptable panorama to be. A "panorama" is defined as an image having at least a 1 to 2 (1/2) aspect ratio (twice as wide as it is high) though the most common ratio is 1/3. For example, a 1/2 ratio panoramic landscape photo could be printed to 20 inches wide, but would be limited to a 10 inch height, and would have an area of 200 inches. Similarly, if your photo can be composed in a 1/3 format, you could print it 30 inches wide, but the height would still be 10 inches, and the area would be 300 inches. As a final example, if you wanted to utilize the maximum 40 inch width allowed, you would have to compose your photo in a 1/5 ratio, making the height 8 inches to get the maximum area of 320 inches.

Prize money and ribbons in all the above categories include: First Place, $20.00; Second Place, $15.00; Third Place, $10.00; Ribbons only will be awarded for Honorable Mention.

The only category for Youth entries this year is Open, which is “any subject matter in good taste.” Any Youth photographer (16 and under) may enter up to two color AND two black and white prints. Please indicate on your registration form how many prints of each type you are entering.

Prize money and ribbons the Youth categories include: First Place, $20.00; Second Place, $15.00; Third Place, $10.00; Ribbons only for Honorable Mention.

Good luck, but most of all, have fun!

As of this writing, the summer has been lovely – almost enough rain, lots of sunshine. Enough fog to take photos on the coast, enough sunshine to ride the Sunrise Trail, taking photos of osprey. The old folks used to call Daylight Savings “Fast Time” and it seems that summer does go much faster than the winter months. That said, it is now time to think about the fall and semi-monthly meetings.

Our first meeting this fall will be held on Sept 6^th, 2018. This meeting is for members and those who plan to join. This provides us an opportunity to re-connect with old friends and meet new ones. Members should have received a letter in the mail with details. If you are planning to join and would like to attend please contact us by sending an e-mail to info@eastermainecameraclub.org.

During the past year, in addition to our field trip schedule, with guidance from Kevin Doyle, we initiated an Instagram Challenge, where members can upload photos and choose favorites. We are looking forward to learning what our Field Trip Guru, Don Darling, will include for interesting and challenging trips this year.

Please send dues to Treasurer Larry Sherwood, using the form found at this link: Click here for Membership Form.  Keeping dues current enables you to compete in competitions.

Finally, I want to recognize the wonderful job that Jeanne Caron has done as President of the Club. Her personality, cheerfulness and patience are an example for all of us.

To a wonderful year.

Liz Champeon

Eastern Maine Camera Club President

At our awards banquet this year we voted for the 2017-2018 Season competition categories.  Thanks to all who attended and voted.  With no further ado...the winners are:

• Open
• Nature
• Abandoned in Maine
• Seasons
• Animals
• Flowers
• Open Again

They may not end up in this order.  I'm sure Joel will be publishing a new schedule for the 2017-2018 season well before we start in September. 

(Italicized items were decided by the vote, others are permanent categories) 

Photography is a medium for depicting the human condition. Scenes capturing every day life on urban streets provide momentary reflection of ourselves in the act of living.  The AW@3Fish Gallery in Portland has such an exhibit with images from one of our upcoming speakers. The exhibit will be open until September 20.

"Urban Street Shots"

You can get a look at the gallery web site here:  http://www.addisonwoolley.com/

Take the opportunity to see this fine work if you are in the vicinity of Portland.

Don

The Bangor State Fair 2016 Photo Contest has wrapped up.  The results have been posted here: http://easternmainecameraclub.org/bangor-fair.aspx.

To get more information click here for our Contact Us form.

Some members are reporting that they are not getting the emails that Don sends out regularly.  Don sends the emails as a "Newsletter" from our website.  So the emails get generated by the web site, and are automatically sent to all members who have registered on the web site, paid their dues and subscribed to the newsletter.  Oh, and they are sent to the email address you registered with.  They come from info@easternmainecameraclub.org.

So there are a couple things you can check if you are not getting the emails. 

1.  Is your email registered correctly on our web site?
2.  Are you subscribed to the Newsletter?
3.  Is mail from info@easternmainecameraclub.org going to your spam folder?

So for the first item, log on to our web site and click on the "My Account" link at the very top of any page.  There you will see a "Security/Identity" tab, where you can change your email address (you can't change your id, that always stays the same).

To check that you are subscribed to the newsletter go to the "Newsletter" tab.  There you will see a check box (image below) for the "EMCC Somewhat Daily Newsletter".  That has to be checked in order for the emails to be sent to you.  Only members can sign up for this newsletter. 

Also notice there is a "View Previous Editions" link.  You can always go there to see all the communications we have sent.  Check it out, it's a good place to look and see if you have been missing anything.

If all of that is OK and you are still not getting your emails you may want to check your spam folder.  All email systems are a little different but almost all have a way to mark email as "Not Junk".  Several of our members with AOL mail have found the newsletters going to spam.  Below I'll include some instructions I found online for marking email as "not spam" in AOL.  If you are using another system and can't figure it out just send me an email, let me know what system you have,  and I'll see if I can dig up some instructions for you. 

Each season we have 7 competitions.   The subjects Open, Nature, Animals and People are repeated each season.  The Open subject is used twice, typically the first and last competition of each season.   In addition to the fixed subjects we vote on two additional "Special" subjects at the end of each season, for the next seasons.

In this years vote the winning Special Subjects for the 2014-2015 Season were:

• Barns
• Macro

Joel has created a tentative schedule for next year that will tell you the dates we expect to hold these competitions, and he has also included definitions for all the subjects.  You can find that information on our Schedule page here: http://easternmainecameraclub.org/events.aspx

Our membership also voted to reduce the number of photo's each member can enter in digital projection formats.  The limit was 2 images per member and we voted to reduce it to 1 image per member.  Here is a summary of the photos you will be allowed to submit for each competition next season:

One final item we voted on...the web site tag line.  We voted on the list of Tag Lines submitted by members and the winner was "Developing Photographers".  You can see at the top of the page that it has been updated. 

Have a great summer everyone! 

Remember that glitch with calculating averages last month that I told you all was fixed?  Well I was just kidding, it wasn't really fixed. 

Seriously, I thought I had made a mistake in the order I processed things last month, and I did some testing and everything seemed to be working just fine. Unfortuately we had the same problem again this month, which caused some of our awards to be reported incorrectly. 

So, I've done two things.  I spent the entire morning fixing the problem, testing much more thouroughly and I've created a report that highlights the changes. 

The Event Results page on our web site has been updated with the correct scores.  If you like to see all the changes look at this PDF summary:  People Competition Award Change Summary

Again, I'm very sorry for the problems.  I will keep a close eye on this at our next competition and will check them before we announce the results.  If you'd like more detail about the problem contact me.  I'd be glad to give you the gory details if you are interested.

~Kevin