Hey there, image makers and friends,

This is a reminder that we are having a Chamber of Commerce ribbon cutting ceremony this morning (Tuesday) at 11:30 a.m. at The Great Frame Up in the Publix shopping center on Highway 5.

Here is a map to the Great Frame Up.

We would enjoy having you come over for a few minutes to celebrate this milestone with us. We will be serving light refreshments and making a group picture that will be published in several local publications including the Douglas County Sentinel and the Chapel Hill News & Views.

Our hosting sponsors this morning, Jerry Leath of The Great Frame Up, will be on hand to discuss his venture into the world of do-it-yourself high resolution printing using his new 8-color wide format Epson printer.

If you can’t make it, be sure to come to our next meeting a week and a half from now on Thursday, August 21st at 6:30 p.m. at St Julian’s Episcopal Church here in Douglasville.

Last month the Digital Image Group had 31 people come to our 3rd meeting ever. 14 people gave presentations . . . and here is a list of the kinds of imagery and topics that were featured for all to learn from and enjoy:

1. Susan Morris displayed her 4”x6” prints of July 4th Fireworks. She was able to capture the fiery displays while preserving image sharpness, color and variety. On many of them she got her exposure “just right.”
2. John Fuller presented “Some of My Favorites” including well composed pictures of fawns, bucks, does, bluebirds, turkeys, woodpeckers, red breasted grosbeaks and ponies.
3. Walter Wills presented “Aviation Photography.” His  incredibly strong images included fly-bys by the Blue Angels, Navy Snowbirds, vintage aircraft, some amazing Air Force Thunderbird jets flying in extremely close proximity,  and old fashioned “sky walkers.” Walter’s photographs were nothing short of amazing. He discussed his techniques for catching propeller motion and contrails (vapor trails)
4. Charles Phaneuf showed “3 moons and 2 train wrecks.” Charles has been working on his astronomical photography to capture close-up detail on the Moon’s surface. His train wreck pictures were taken as part of his career work with the railroad.
5. Professional Videographer Joe Orenzow displayed his “OVP Demos” (Orenzow Video Productions Demo Reel). Joe works as an Information Technology Technician for the City of Douglasville as well as co-owning his own video production company along with his wife Bess.  His reel included sophisticated wedding clips and professional commercial work. This included complex imagery of the marriage of Douglasville Mayor Mickey Thompson’s daughter. Joe discussed some of the obstacles to be overcome in working with video. His wife Bess mentioned that Wedding Videos done right can take months to finish due to the fine tuned editing and many background music passages needed to make a successful production. Joe sent me a sample of his new video e-mail marketing product “OVP CyberAds” -  a Talk Fusion video e-mail you have to see to believe! Orenzow Video Productions provides this leading edge video product to help people market themselves, their organizations, companies, events and products. You can see a sample at this link: http://app.talkfusion.com/talkFusionStudio/view.asp?230480_1915125 . Joe promises to come back and give technical and artistic video seminars / demonstrations including “WALLDO” (Wide Angle Low-Linking Depth and Opposite) to enhance video compositions.
6. Professional Photographer Greg Knobloch of the CDC gave a live demonstration of Portrait Lighting and Flash Techniques. He seated his model in a comfortable position, then attached a Speedlite flash to his Nikon D200 and aimed it to the left of the lens axis to bounce light off a large round white reflector which in turn bounced the light onto the left  and front sides of the subject, casting a natural soft even light on the model’s face. Greg varied his shutter speed in order to control how much light reflected back from the background behind the model. He pointed out to the audience that the portable white/gold reflector disk, light stand and speed lite don’t weigh much, allowing him to travel light when he goes on location to create fine portraits.
7. Jim Gardner, the Digital Image Group technical specialist, showed “White Flowers” which pointed out some of the issues we have with calibrating our digital projector. He displayed a number of pictures of Lotus flowers and Magnolia blossoms, describing the difficulties in holding detail in white flower highlights.
8. Tawanna Wilson entitled her presentation “STUFF.” She shared her interest in taking portraits of senior citizens, teens, babies and newlyweds and her work with Photoshop and Adobe Lightroom. Tawanna has been combining images with text to explore electronic publishing.   She also presented experimental images where she inverted colors in Photoshop and created special fireworks images at Disney World.   Tawanna uses a Canon 10d digital camera.
9. Professional Photographer and Photojournalist Tim Hale gave an 11 minute presentation entitled “Fort McCoy.” Tim recently returned to Douglasville after spending several weeks photographing military training exercises at Fort McCoy, an active United States Army installation in west central Wisconsin. Tim’s pictures depict the strenuous training required of soldiers headed into combat. His pictures of the Urban War Fighting Orienteering Course show that photographers are often placed in conditions as rugged as the subjects they are required to shoot. He showed several night vision photos created by attaching a night vision device to a normal 50 mm lens. Tim used a remote camera on a gunnery range to safely capture action pictures of soldiers qualifying with their rifles. Using the same remote camera technique, he captured night fire qualification event pictures as well. 
    
10. Jim Enterkin gave a ProShow Gold video entitled “Trip to Middle Tennessee.” Jim combined homegrown music (bluegrass and traditional music) with pictures depicting the beautiful landscapes and farms of Tennessee. His pictures of barns, old farm houses, plowmen in the fields, horses are all well composed and vibrant. Many of them could easily have found their way into National Geographic as a regional sketch of Middle Tennessee. One portion of the video features Jim’s love of trains presented to the tune “Casey Jones.”
11. Neil Corbin’s presentation was entitled “Cropping.” This provoked a stimulating discussion between 5 or 6 people. According to Neil, ”Part of the value of this club to me is getting input from other people. How do you handle cropping?” Neil presented several challenging pictures of yard ornaments, antiques and sculpted statues dwelling in a busy landscape scene. The DIG audience made suggestions about different ways to crop images to maximize the impact and separate out different pictures from within the main photo. The discussion centered around “standard photo sizes” versus “custom photo sizes” due to cropping. Because not every picture can fit neatly into a standard rectangle, matting the picture helps fit a custom sized picture into a standard frame. Otherwise, a custom frame may also be a logical choice.
12. Gene Spicer of Cartridge World presented “Flower Children.” Gene’s colorful abstract imagery was created using Photoshop’s liquefy tool and a variety of techniques. To begin with he took a blue flower and abstracted it, then went off the deep end of the image making pool and never returned. We discussed the proper format for pictures to be show at DIG. Gene’s 25 to 45 megabyte tiff files were difficult to show due to the computer processing time needed to scale the picture down for projection. Usually a 1024x768 pixel jpeg picture will project large just fine without pixelization and without becoming too large to present smoothly if there are several in a row to show.
13. Kent Owings showed “Glacier National Park,” spectacular black and white and color scenic landscape images made during his recent trip to Montana.  Kent experimented with waterfalls and streams, varying his shutter speed to enhance the milky smooth surface texture of the water.  He chose a variety of angles and perspectives, sometimes getting close to the ground or shooting verticals in what we normally consider a horizontal landscape. His pictures included panoramas of the icy mountains as well as an aged native American and some mountain goats and sheep. He braved 30 to 40mph winds and of course, chilly weather near the glacier. 
     
14. Frank Karycinski discussed his experiments with “abstract tree images.” Some of his pictures were made at the cemetery just off Church Street in Douglasville. He turned trees upside down, mirrored,  inverted and recolored them in Photoshop to create mysterious other-worldly facial mask-like visages. His point was to show a series of images as a creative process. One of the locations where he found excellent subject matter is just below and behind the Home Depot on Thornton Road where there is a small nature sanctuary set slightly away from I-20.   

We would especially like to thank those of you who donated some of your hard-earned money to help us join the Chamber of Commerce. We collected $76 at the meeting out of the $200 per year that our membership fees run. Norma and I had planned to pay the entire amount, so your contributions mean a lot to us.

Again, if you can make it to the Ribbon Cutting, it’s this morning at 11:30 a.m.