Our member, Tony Gaskins presented us with an illustrated talk on his visit to the Kenya game reserves last night. Tony's talk was perfectly timed, and his description of the trip held our attention throughout the evening, the images he captured were indeed stunning. The variety of wildlife he captured with his camera were amazing, all of the photos of birds were incredible, and the fact that they didn't fly off like they do here in the UK. On Lake Naivasha Tony captured a sequence of a fish eagle swooping down to catch a fish, just look at the way those deadly talons are outstretched to capture the fish. The lodge Tony stayed in at Tsavo West was beside a watering hole, look at this capture of a Kirk's Dik Dik, taken from the balcony of the lodge. Images of Hippopotamus, Lions, Impala, Ostrich, Giraffe and Zebra kept us enthralled through the evening. Thank you and well done Tony for an interesting evening.

Good Evening All A little late as just got back late this afternoon from the golfing trip, I didn't take my camera other than phone as I wouldn't have really had time but there was some interesting wildlife about including Swallowtail butterflies which was a first for me. Last week you had the monthly PDI competition, Long Exposures and Open, Derek has done a blog on our website and the competition page has all the results. Some excellent photography on show judging by the top places. This week, Wednesday 24th September, we have member Tony Gaskins entertaining us with one of his talks, Tony is well travelled so as usual it will be an excellent evening of photography. Regards Graham

Last week we held our first PDI competition after the summer break, and what a superb evening it was. There were some excellent images submitted into the competition, and over half of the submitted entries were "held back" for awarding higher points, Tony Houlden was the judge for the evening. This week, Wednesday 24th September, Tony Gaskin will be giving an illustrated talk on his recent visit to the Maasai Mara game reserve in Kenya, it will be an interesting evening, with some stunning photography. Harry will be taking entries for our next PDI competition, with the categories of "Local 5 minutes From Your House", (in this case the "Local" applies to your house, not the 25 miles from Louth) and "Open". Harry is also taking entries for the LPA Competition, he's looking for 6 entries in this competition, from each member. I've been out, and about as usual, this photo is of an abandoned garage forecourt on the road to Spilsby.

This was our first competition after the summer break. The categories for the competition were "Long Exposure", and "Open" and our judge for the evening was Tony Houlden. We began the evening with the "Long Exposure" category, something of a surprise in this section were the amount of night time images, more typically were the images of flowing water, either of the sea or in rivers, Tony judged these images skillfully, and with his usual sense of humour. Dave Turner was placed first with his excellent "Saltburn by the Sea Morning", Keith Rossington took second place with his beautiful night time image of the river at York "From the Bridge", Harry Kerman showed the "River Dee, Cairngorms, Scotland" the flowing peat laden waters stilled in this carefully composed image. After the break, Tony began the judging of the "Open" category, I always think this is the more difficult category to judge because of the variety of images presented, Tony judged these thoughtfully, providing excellent critique. Dave Turner took first place with his monochrome view of "Scarborough Bay", I was pleased to take second place with "Sunset Jetty" taken on my holiday in Corfu, and third place with my monochrome "Haworth Main Street". It was an excellent evening, with some amazing images, Tony's critique was very helpful, highlighting unwanted distracting items in an image, haloing from excessive sharpening, and cropping errors. Thanks to Tony for judging, and Dave Mann for the refreshments.

Good Morning All Last week at the club we held a series of members mini lectures, showing what you had done over the summer break, sorry I missed the evening but judging by Derek's blog you were treated to some very good photography. This week, Wednesday 17th September, we are holding our September PDI (projected Digital Image) competition, with the categories of "Long Exposures" and "Open", all entries are now in, and scoresheets sent out. Tony Houlden will be our judge for this one and I am afraid I won't make it again due to a golfing holiday in Portugal. I will all being well see you all the week after. Don't forget if you want to enter the N&EMPF exhibition you need to sort out some of your best PDI's that you have not already entered and send them to me, sized to 1600px x 1200px. If you require more information, just email me with your queries. Regards Graham

And - we're back, after the summer break. Last night we held a series of short illustrated talks on the topic of; "What Have You Done Over The Summer?" Richard Hildred was up first with his trips to Vilnius, Lithuania, and Denver, Colorado, USA, which was a very interesting talk, and view of parts of the world that many of us had not visited. I gave a talk on my holiday in Corfu, and visits to Richmond, Yorkshire, and Skipton. After refreshments Harry showed us some of the photos taken on the boat trip from Bridlington, to Bempton Cliffs photographing the Gannets, and Puffins. Tony dazzled, and delighted us with his visit to the Maasai Mara game reserve, Kenya. Last but not least was Chris with some excellent photos from the Transport Museum, Sandtoft, Doncaster. It was an excellent night, and our newly purchased laptop performed well, the graphics were much sharper projected onto the screen.

A big thank you for the positive comments on my recent “Should I shoot in RAW or .jpg” blog. Following on from that blog I wanted to share with you the image editing software that I use in editing my images. FastStone (Windows only) I believe that this is an essential tool for every photographer to download, and use. The software is completely free to download, FastStone does ask for a donation, which helps to develop the software. The editing tools are easy to use, with easy to learn keyboard short cuts. Predominantly, the software is for viewing, and editing .jpg files only, RAW images can be viewed, but in a restricted resolution. The clone, and healing tools on FastStone are exceptionally good, I often use the cloning tool, then follow up with the healing brush to smooth over any harsh lines from the cloning. Cropping, and resizing images again is very easy with FastStone, open a file of images, select the image you want to crop, click “X” on the keyboard, and a range of crop sizes are available. For competitions I always use FastStone to resize my images, “Ctrl + R” to resize to say 1920px by 1200px for our projector size, “Ctrl + S” to save. The FastStone default colour space photometric is “YCbCr”, which results in a 2 or 3 times smaller file size, I prefer to click the “options” tab on the save dialog box, and select “RGB”. In preparing images for a recent competition, with a resized 1200px by 1200px photo, FastStone “YCbCr” photometric produced a file size of 871KB, switching to “RGB” produced a file size of 1752KB, and all the steps can be viewed on the attached screenshots. Serif Affinity Photo (Windows and Apple Mac) This is a comprehensive editing suite for .jpg and RAW, there are many YouTube videos to teach the tools available. I like the perspective tool, ideal for straightening buildings, and the inpainting tool is very useful to fill in gaps in a background, or blemishes in the skin. Compositing images can be readily accomplished, with different layers. Affinity Photo is available as a one-time purchase – currently £67.99 Luminar Neo (Windows and Apple Mac) This is my preferred editing suite, able to edit both .jpg, and RAW images. The main benefit of the software for me is the ability to batch edit my images. Often, I will be out with my camera, and return with several hundred images, and I can edit the first image of the batch, and copy / paste to succeeding images from the ribbon of images at the foot of the software. The masking brush tools are so easy to use, enabling direct painting in of exposure, sharpness, or any other effect into the image. Take an example of a bird, or insect against a dark background, I can just click the exposure tool, select the mask, and paint the subject directly with the mask, then use the slider to increase the exposure, and any of the tool effects can be painted in the same manner, shadows, highlights, and sharpening. Luminar Neo is available as a one-time purchase, or subscription. Currently a perpetual licence is on sale for £99. Other Editing Suites GIMP, and DarkTable are both cross platform .jpg, and RAW image editors, and completely free to download and use. Capture One Pro - Superior image quality, precision editing, and best-in-class tethering, so their website states. £111 annual subscription. DxO Photolab 9 - The world’s most advanced, end-to-end, RAW photo editing software. £219.99 one-time purchase. Adobe Photoshop - Is a raster graphics editor developed and published by Adobe for Windows and macOS. Subscription model £21.98 monthly. Adobe Lightroom - Make your photos look better than ever, no matter your skill level. New Quick Actions give you creative assistance tailored to your unique photo. And with Generative Remove, you can clean up unwanted distractions in a touch. Plans starting at £11.99 monthly incl. VAT for the annual billed monthly plan. Corel Paintshop Pro - Enjoy powerful and complete editing of RAW files with a great variety of pro-level tools available in the new AfterShot Lab, now inside PaintShop Pro. There is no need for extra applications or for running several editing processes in parallel, with timesaving and streamlined RAW image editing. Full licence £89.99. Conclusion Photo editing can be a rewarding experience with the correct tools but learning how to get the best from your software, and images can be a steep learning curve. YouTube videos can really be your friend here, Anthony Turnham, and Jim Nix have taught me a lot about Luminar Neo – and I’m still learning!! Also take advantage of any 30 day trial offers, you have to find software that you can work with, and that can speed up your workflow.

This is always a hotly debated subject among photographers, and I would say “it depends” quietly sitting on the fence!! Let me qualify, if your resulting image is destined to be shared on social media with very little post processing, and the image is correctly exposed, then most certainly use the .jpg format. Sharing any image to Facebook will result in a degraded image because Facebook processes the image for a small screen, Instagram images will be viewed usually on a smart phone, so a .jpg direct from a camera will suffice. For many years I used to shoot primarily in .jpg, and I’ve entered competitions with those images, when I had my Fuji cameras the RAW format images from the 24-megapixel sensor were 55 megapixel, so I tended to shoot mainly in .jpg. With my Olympus cameras and the 20-megapixel sensor the RAW images are more usable. Now, let’s examine the facts behind any decision: JPEG (.jpg) images are fully processed in camera, and all settings such as White Balance, Colour Saturation, Tone Curve, Sharpening, and Colour Space are applied to the image by the camera processor and are therefore ready to use. Many digital cameras allow changing the Colour Saturation, either by adjusting the Tone Curve, selecting a Film Simulation, or applying a LUT to the resulting image. LUT = Look Up Table, primarily used for video, but can be applied to a stills image. JPEG images are an 8-bit digital format, producing 16.8 million possible colours, (256 tonal values for Red, Green, and Blue channels) any other colours that your camera is capable of are discarded, and the “lossy” compression of a .jpg will result in a loss of data in an image, possibly displaying artifacts in a large, printed image. RAW images are a proprietary format tied to a specific camera manufacturer and must be post processed. My camera system produces a 12-bit digital image capable of producing 68.7 billion colours. The RAW image has far greater dynamic range, and colour gamut compared to a .jpg image. Highlights can be corrected, and shadow detail can be readily recovered from a RAW image. Personally, when I used to shoot in .jpg I tended to post process my images, applying a preset, and any cropping, so post processing the RAW images doesn’t take much more of my time. When I’ve been out taking a set of images, my workflow involves processing the first RAW image of the set, then copy / paste onto the following images. Attached to this post are two underexposed images of flowers, and the recovery of the RAW image has resulted in a reasonably usable image, the .jpg image is unusable with washed out colours. With the two photos of a model, one is the .jpg saved directly from the camera SD card, and the other has been post processed from the RAW – I have cropped both images to 2:3 ratio, I feel that the image post processed from RAW has a richer colour palette. In summation, .jpg for simplicity, and RAW for fine detail, and greater dynamic range.

Good Morning All I hope you're all enjoying the summer break, we have just got back from a week on the Suffolk coast, staying near Lowestoft. It was good to meet up with quite a few of our members at the King's Head last night to celebrate the life of Paul Malley. Paul had been a very popular member of our club for a long time and so it was only fitting that many of us turned up to say goodbye. Harry is now wanting two things from us all, firstly it is that time of year when we enter the LPA Interclub PDI competition, if we can, as many members as possible to send him six PDI's the best you have that have not been in the competition before. Harry will also look through past competitions for entries as well. If we say a closing date of midnight next Friday that should give you time to have a look through your PDI's. We are back at the club, Wednesday 10th September, beginning with a series of mini lectures, showing us what you have been up to during the break, about 15 minutes each. If you can let me know if you want to take part then we may adjust times to fill the night. The following week, Wednesday 17th September, a PDI competition will be held with the categories of "Long Exposures" and "Open". I was asked how long is a long exposure and that was a good question, I just put it in the program off the suggestion list and never gave it a thought at the time, I will have to give the judge some guidance as well. Please email me with any suggestion if you think this is wrong. I think slower than 1/30 shutter speed but to show movement or a night shot should give us all a chance of entering. A bit of a tricky one but if you think you can have shutter speeds of many thousands 1/30 is quite long and we want members to enter. Harry will accept our entries any time now. Regards Graham