Straight Out of Your Camera

Friday, 26 August 2016

I recently signed up with a photo club on Meet Up (https://www.meetup.com/Frederick-County-Photography-Club). Actually I’m on their 30 day trial. Annual membership fee is $25. Having met some of the gang twice now, I’ll be paying my dues next week. So far I’ve enjoyed the meetups.

This past Wednesday seven of us did a photo walk challenge in Adamstown Maryland, “straight out of your camera”.  No post processing at all.  

Jamie is the organizer of this club and provided instructions. Everyone had to select three words/phrases and write each one on a separate paper. We ended up drawing four words from the ‘hat”: Red, Window, Light, and Glass. We had to photograph subjects that included those words with a minimum of two words.  

Jamie passed out 256mb (or smaller) cards to use and had to shoot jpg only. What made this interesting is that it leveled out the playing field. Those with full frame cameras/higher megapixels had a lower number of shots to take; while those with entry level cameras/smaller megapixels had a larger number of shots to take.

We spent an hour walking around town. Adamstown isn’t much to look at, but I was happy with what I photographed.  At the start of the walk, I headed in the opposite direction of the group, catching up with a few later. 

We were limited to submitting three of our best photos at the end of the challenge, deleting the rest off the card. These are the ones I submitted:

What I liked about the challenge is that it forced me to carefully look at a scene/subject and take the shot knowing I couldn’t make any changes to the photo. I took my time looking at the subject, framing, moving in/out, looking from different angles, etc, before hitting the shutter. 

While out for the hour, everyone could swap the memory card for their own to keep. I did that but I also uploaded my three challenge photos to my smartphone.  

Group voting is going on right now and will end on Tuesday.

I'll update this post next week and let you know if I won the challenge or not.

You can see the other photos I took that day at this link: http://www.pileggiphotography.com/MarylandScenes/Adamstown-Maryland/


PS: 10 September 2016: The firetruck came in first; the red bike came in 5th.