Your MCC Starter kit

This presentation was made to the club members and potential new members. It is a starter kit for your Photography with some tips and pointers of where to go for information and help, as well as how to get the most out of your membership to Marlow Camera Club.

 

All content Copyright (C) 2025 Andrew Kirby and Copyright (C) 2025 Marlow Camera Club except where quoted and credited to original sources.

We started by asking why are we interested in photography.

Many members shared their reasons which were wide and varied.

Andy shared that he’s a visual thinker but absolutely rubbish as expressing those visuals by drawing or other means that require eye-to-hand coordination.  For him, photography is a way to create images and express visual thoughts without the need to draw. It also engages his more technical and scientific interests while exercising the more artistic parts of the mind.

Andy mentioned that he enjoys following Roman Fox on YouTube and Social Media. Roman’s photographic style is something that Andy appreciates and draws inspiration from.

Roman’s website can be found here: www.snapsbyfox.com

Roman often sends out emails with blog articles and this week there happened to be one entitled “Why is Photography the best hobby?”

Photography Is The Best Hobby

I’ve recently been talking to a friend about the different hobbies we’ve had over the years. Mountain biking, cars, hiking, computer games, just to name a few. Pretty quickly we concluded that photography is actually the best hobby in the world. Here’s why:

It’s creative

Everyone needs a creative outlet, whether it’s painting, singing, or knitting. We’re naturally creative creatures, and we thrive when we make things. Having a creative outlet is essential for mental health, happiness, and overall life satisfaction. Photography gives you that outlet every single day.

It’s technical

While creativity uses one side of your brain, photography also taps into the more analytical side. Settings, cameras, focal lengths, lighting – it can be as technical as you want it to be. And that’s not a bad thing.

It involves gadgets

Photography involves buying gadgets, and who doesn’t enjoy that? Sure, there’s a small group of film purists who cringe at the mention of “gear”, but even the most artistic photographers like a new camera now and then.

It’s affordable

Sure, cameras can be very expensive, but if we’re honest with ourselves, we know photography can easily be done on a budget.

It requires problem solving

From figuring out how to capture a shot, to planning a route, or setting up a scene, photography constantly challenges your problem-solving skills.

It gets you out

Without photography, if you told someone you were going on a six-hour walk alone, for no reason, people might start to worry after a while. Jokes aside, photography gets you outdoors, whether it’s a stroll around your local town or a six-month trip across the world. Without it, you’d probably spend a lot less time outside.

It forces you to observe and be present

I love travel, and there’s a huge difference in how I experienced it before and after photography. I barely remember my trips before picking up a camera, but now I can recall them in detail. When you’re shooting, you’re paying attention to every part of the scene. It might seem like you’re not present, but I’d argue you’re actually more present than if you weren’t holding a camera.

It keeps you fit

My average photowalk is between 25–35k steps a day. On bigger days, I can hit 60k. Photography gets you moving – across cities, up mountains, early in the morning, and late into the night. It’s a physical hobby that helps keep your fitness in check.

It can be combined with other activities

Holidays, hiking, camping, city breaks, backpacking, cycling – photography fits into them all and makes them even more rewarding.

It’s social

While some genres, like street photography, are often done alone, photography is also very social, especially with social media. I have two groups of friends: those I grew up with, and those I met through photography. Without my camera, I’d have half the friends and 80% fewer memories and experiences.

It grows with you

Some hobbies fade with age. Downhill mountain biking is great at 18, not so much at 48. Photography is different. As long as you can see, think, and walk, you can keep shooting. It’s a lifelong hobby that evolves as you do.

It leaves something behind

Every photo you take will one day be seen by future generations. If you share your work online, it might even be seen by someone on the other side of the world who doesn’t speak your language. Even if you don’t care about this aspect, your photography leaves a mark.

It’s never finished

Photography is never complete. There’s no finish line, no point where you’re “done”. It stays with you, always running in the background, always part of your life.

I don’t know about you, but the more I think about it, the more I’m convinced that this is the best hobby in the world.

–Roman Fox

On the point about it being affordable, Andy noted that you can buy some truly amazing camera on the used market from the likes of MPB and unless you’re heavily cropping, 20 Megapixels is plenty for making A3 prints and more than enough for projected images or images displayed on a computer screen.

So why join a camera club? Why on earth would you want to do that?

What do we offer members?

A club enables photographic experiences that you may not otherwise experience. Examples include: Photographing birds of prey at close quarters, Working with professional models, trying out different techniques that you may not ordinarily encounter, like light painting.

Competitions do three things: obviously there’s the competitive element, but also members benefit from the judges commentary and critique as well as a programme of competitions giving motivation to get out and take photographs in order to participate.

There is an element of entertainment – we hope that as well as informative our programme is entertaining and amusing.

The club is a great place to meet like-minded people.  Many friendships have been made through the club – “The Coven” being an example and it was great to see Mary and Margaret back at the club.

Seeing other people’s ideas and discussing our images is a great way to exchange ideas – and while outright copying is not very sporting, taking an idea and adding your own flair and touches to make it your own is a great way to learn and develop.

One common thread that runs through all these things is improvement. Whether we consciously seek it or not all these things improve our photography skills.  Whether you’re actively taking photographs or just looking at other people’s work, it all adds up to help us improve…

Most people start taking snaps or ‘record shots’ as they record a moment in time.  These days it’s easy to take a reasonable snap with all the automatic features that cameras and phones have.

From here you learn some technical skills to control the image and make it appear how you want.

Once you start to control the image then we bring in compositional skills – the more ‘arty’ things that make a good image look attractive.

Both technical and compositional skills are honed over a period so they become second nature.  We develop attention to detail.  It’s still okay to take snaps but we move toward intentionally constructing an image from an idea than recording a moment.

Once they’re at this stage some photographers look at submitting a panel of images to the Royal Photographic Society to earn their LRPS qualification.

Once into the stride of constructing images we can begin to use them to communicate ideas, feelings and emotions.

Many photographers then begin to develop a distinct photographic style where the kinds of images they make are recognisably their work. When you look at some of the most experienced photographers in our club you can instantly recognise it – and that’s their personal style showing through.

At this level some photographers think about attaining their ARPS distinction with the RPS.

Finally, we work on our style and try to be outstanding – standing out for excellence.

At that level some attain the FRPS distinction.

It’s not all about distinctions – it’s about doing what you enjoy – and for most getting better at what you enjoy makes is more enjoyable.

There’s a ton of stuff that count as ‘The Basics’.  Sorry to disappoint but we’re not going to cover them all tonight…

What I do want to do is show that by being a part of Marlow Camera Club you can build a photography toolkit that helps you on your photographic journey and enjoy the ride!

Besides our regular meetings which feature lectures, workshops, competitions and member’s evenings the club has a very active WhatsApp group which is divided into channels on different topics.

Members also have access to a private Facebook group.

Both of these were used to great effect during the summer when Rowena and Mary ran a weekly image challenge – where each week members were challenged to take photos on a certain theme or using a particular technique and share the results. This was immensely popular.

We also ran some excursions and visits during the sumner to locations for photography – and also keep in touch over the summer break by having a pint afterwards in a nearby pub.

We highlighted some of the events from the programme this season that may be of interest – the full programme can be found on the website in the Calendar page

Computers, Software and Editing

MCC is Marlow Camera Club and while computers are necessary in the modern production process, we try not become Marlow Computer Club.

Most members use one of three software packages and if you also use one of the ‘big three’ then you’ll find there is plenty of help and expertise in the club.

Affinity Photo is from Serif. It competes with Adobe Photoshop. The software license is sold on a basis that each major version requires paying full price, however minor versions are free updates. It is considered to be reasonably priced and Serif often run promotions where the price is discounted. Many people who were using Photoshop Elements seem to have moved to Affinity Photo.  Since it is so popular, there are plenty of online resources for learning and problem solving.

Photoshop is also popular within the club. It has a long history of being one of the premier image editing software packages and was priced accordingly. Adobe are constantly adding new features and some of the newest AI features for making complex selections and generative fill are quite impressive. Many members are subscribers to the Adobe Photography Programme which offers Photoshop, Lightroom Classic and Lightroom as well as access to cloud storage, and cloud based AI and editing tools for a monthly subscription of about £15.

Lightroom is a photo management tool with editing tools built in. Lightroom is non-destructive in that the image adjustments are stored separately from the image, so the original image is never over-written.  Most common adjustments photographers use can be done in Lightroom, but we often use Photoshop where more fine adjustment is needed.  Also, adjustment tools like Nik Efex are popular as well as “Presets” which are a quick way to achieve a style or look.

I love a good book! There are some great books out there that help with photo editing techniques and photography in general. Here are some of my current favourites:

The Headshot by Peter Hurley https://amzn.eu/d/dfWhN7S

Fine Art Inkjet Printing by Jim Nickelson https://amzn.eu/d/41tkUhO

Lightroom Transformations by Martin Evening https://amzn.eu/d/9MePnOT

Close-up and Macro Photography – Art and Techniques by John Humphrey https://amzn.eu/d/9XC2vrF

The Photoshop Workbook – Glyn Dewis https://amzn.eu/d/dc82zbI

Creative and Experimental Photography – Art and Techniques by John Humphrey https://amzn.eu/d/5DziXb6

Photograph like a thief – Glyn Dewis https://amzn.eu/d/gpLsE2C

Photoshop Layers and Selections Workshop – Glyn Dewis https://amzn.eu/d/68arQJG

The Photoshop Toolbox  – Glyn Dewis https://amzn.eu/d/evt3Xwu

YouTube is a great resource. You can find out how to do pretty much anything and it’s a source of ideas as well as equipment reviews.

There is a trend that videos on YouTube can be fast paced so you have to use the pause button if you’re trying to follow along.

Here’s a list of some of my favourite Youtube channels (all clickable links):

If you find any useful, interesting or entertaining photography related YouTube channels or content, please share it on our WhatsApp group.

Here are a couple of examples shown:

Great thing about skillshare is that the courses are curated and come with files you can download to follow along.

It’s great for Affinity Photo, Adobe Photoshop and Lightroom.

Courses are detailed and are paced slower – for instance Affinity Masking and Selection class is 4 hours broken into 52 lessons of between 3-10 minutes.

Try it and get one month FREE using this link:

https://skl.sh/4nBeAML

 

 

I asked if anyone had used BBC Masterclass – and a few people had.  I asked what people thought about it, and opinions seemed to match mine – that it was disappointing in terms of depth of content. Expectations were high because it was a big name and the BBC but the content seemed thin. We would not recommend BBC Masterclass Photography to our members.

Competitions

Competitions make up between a quarter and a third of what we do at the club.  They are a great way to learn from hearing feedback from the judges as well as an opportunity to see other members’ work and share your own. Personally, I enjoy it when we have an opportunity to talk about images at the end of the night and find out from the author more about their images.

We have two kinds of competitions: Annual Cups competitions and Ordinary Competitions. The ordinary competitions accumulate points throughout the season and the annual competitions are one-off competitions for a particular award or cup.

There are generally two categories in each competition: Prints and Projected Digital Images.

An image can appear once in one ordinary competition and once in an annual competition.

More details in the club’s rules.

 

PhotoEntry is the system used to enter both Print and Projected Digital Image competitions.

For prints, it is necessary to upload a JPG version of the final image so that it can be identified.

For instructions on how to use PhotoEntry – please see our website here.

My first tip about entering competitions is about sharpness.

When we set up the projector in the hall, we always run the auto-setup routine and if you come right up close to the screen you can see the individual pixels – and they are sharply focused.

We also go to some lengths to ensure the computer and projector run at the same resolution to there is no interpolation or mapping between pixels.

So why do some images not look ‘Sharp’ ?

Some things that affect sharpness happen in the camera when we take an image.

Maybe the autofocus locks onto the wrong part of the image.

Perhaps the camera is not held steady enough for the length of exposure.

Or perhaps the subject moves in the frame.

Those are all things that we need to control at the time of shooting the image and there’s not much that we can do about it after the image has been taken.

There are some things that happen when we are editing the image that affect sharpness and those we can do something about.

When we enter our images into a competition they get resized from however many megapixels your camera is (Maybe 20-40 Megapixels) to a much smaller 1400×1050 which is just under 1.5 Megapixels.

We’re actually throwing away a load of information when this happens and it can make the image look less sharp or “soft”.

The last thing you should do to an image – after resizing – is sharpening.

If you use Lightroom, then the export option has a checkbox called “Sharpen for Screen” which you can use. If you are using other software then one of the better options is a filter called ‘Unsharp Mask’.

If you are one of the few people who upload large images to PhotoEntry and rely on PhotoEntry to do the re-sizing, then it will not perform any sharpening and your images may not look as sharp as they could.

It is possible to sharpen too much – it looks like the image on the right hand side which looks a little ‘crispy’ and there appears to be a highlight line around the edge of the bird in areas where there is contrast.

If in doubt,  back off the amount of sharpening a bit, as a little can go a long way and too much can ruin a good image.

Judges sometimes comment that a projected digital image might be improved with the addition of a keyline.  This is often the case where an image is dark or ‘low key’ and it is vague where the edge of the image is on the screen.

A key line is a contrasting line around the border of the image.

Here is an example of how a keyline might improve an image:

In the first image the dark edges blend into the border but in the second image the contrasting white key line gives an impression of where the limits of the image are. In judge speak – it ‘holds the eye within the image’.

This is another example of the effect a key line has on an image.

All of our devices will display the same image file differently.

Technology differs between screens – flat screens may have different kinds of backlighting, and different kinds of screen technology like TFT, IPS and OLED.

The projector uses a metal-halide lamp shining through a monochrome LCD screen with a spinning colour wheel to give colours. Other types of projectors use micro-mirrors to reflect light.

What’s clear is that there is different technology in play in each of these and calibration is an effort to try an make images look the same across devices.

Calibrating a display using specialised calibrator equipment is a great thing to do but there is a lot you can do without such a calibration device…..

The single biggest thing you can do is set the brightness and contrast up properly on your screen.

Default settings on a screen are designed to make it look good in the shop display as people tend to buy the brightest and most colourful looking one.

Optimal settings for working with documents, spreadsheets and such usually call for high brightness and high contrast.  If you are a gamer then you might play with gamma settings and black level so you can see more detail in blacks. If you watch movies on the screen you might also play with the black level to make it look good.

All this is bad for editing photos and making them look consistent.

I have a Lenovo 4K monitor I use with my MacBookPro  and the defaults are: Contrast 85% Brightness 100%. After calibration the brightness control is reduced to 35% to give the correct brightness level.

On my MacbookPro’s internal screen the calibration device shows that it is the correct brightness when the control is set to exactly 50%

I turn off all the automatic features like Night Shift, Auto Brightness and Trutone.

If I calibrate with these settings, comparing the pre and post calibration images they appear identical.

Because Apple have control of the software and hardware they are able to get an almost perfect colour performance with these default settings.

Windows has a built in calibration tool which helps you do some setup.

There used to be a similar thing in MacOS but it has been removed in recent versions – likely as it is not needed in most cases.

If you have a camera, you have the means to measure light!

This will give you a setup close to the brightness that you would achieve with a calibrator device.

There are a some useful test cards you can display on your screen to check your setup.

The CACC test images we often display on the projector at the start of a competition to prove that the projector and computer are working correctly.  We can be sure any dodgy colours or exposure is then definitely in the submitted image and not the fault of the projector.

A final note on calibration – prices of calibrators are coming down all the time – mine when I bought it was close to £400 but it will calibrate printers, projectors as well as displays.

I found this on Amazon recently and for a little over £100 it will calibrate your screen – I would be tempted to try it if I had not better options.

Let’s get away from the technology and talk a little about things you can do to help your chances in a competition that are really nothing to do with actual photography and everything to do about gamesmanship.

We often criticise judges, but they have a tough job. They have to provide meaningful feedback on about sixty images while keeping a mental note of them all in mind so that scores or awards are placed consistently.

When fatigue sets in, prejudices often come out, and judges will look for easy options first when assessing images.

My first piece of advice is to pay close attention to detail.  If you can spot a technical flaw in your image then you can be sure it’s an easy thing for a judge to spot and comment on.  When that happens they might not comment on the other things in your image and you miss out on a meaningful critique.

Another easy thing for a judge to do is compare similar images. You’d be unlucky if another member submits a similar image to yours, but this sometimes happens if there’s been a workshop or event where many of us were present. You can help yourself by not submitting two similar images as one will always do better than the other!

Getting to know the judges is worthwhile.  Although they are supposed to be impartial, some have reputations for liking or disliking certain image genres.  Some like and understand abstract images, while others won’t even attempt to critique them.

The judges will have personal areas of expertise in the own photography. Submitting an image in their area might be a good idea – or it might not.

Remember that tired judge at 10pm having critiqued sixty images? He probably is longing to go home and have a mug of Ovaltine. At this stage images that require a lot of thought or effort to understand are likely not to do well.

Images that do well tend to have impact and clear intent.  Personally I enjoy slow burning images that you can look at for a long time and really appreciate – but in a competition you’ve got a minute or two at best.

Titles are a bit of a debatable topic – my personal belief if that if you need a title to explain a photograph, then maybe it isn’t successful at communicating in itself. I know others disagree!

Finally I wanted to share something I’ve been trying recently.

As my camera kit has grown I find myself with some really nice equipment, but it’s becoming a chore to carry it all around on a day out

So I got a Sony X100VI which is a great pocketable camera with a brilliant lens. But even as someone who’s comfortable with technology, I found that everything was buried in menus and it really jarred the creative flow having to dig around in menus to turn common features on and off.

I recently sold the Sony and bought a Fuji X-E5 which is new to the market this summer.

I’d always liked the idea of the Fuji X100 – the physical  dials and controls appealed and I liked the idea of a small camera. The only thing I didn’t like was the idea of being limited to one focal length.

The X-E5 is similar to the X100 in many ways but the big difference is that the lens is interchangeable, so this ticked all my requirements off – small and pocketable, versatile, manual, and interchangeable lenses.

Here are a few images I have taken in my first few weeks of ownership:

What do I think about it now I’ve used it?

It’ very easy to use, and I like the tactile controls.

I like that there are many X-Mount lenses available from Fuji and third parties and also there are some very affordable second hand options.

The much vaunted film simulation modes seem a bit of a gimmick at first as they only work when shooting JPEGs.  I’m very much a RAW only shooter, so this was a disappointment but I did find that Adobe Lightroom has a facility to applying the Fuji Film simulations to Fuji RAW files.

With the cheaper third party lenses, AF was a little hit and miss but seems fine on Fuji glass.

Overall, I am very happy – and probably the most worthwhile thing is that it is the kind of camera you can carry anywhere and capture anything – it’s miles better than an iPhone and there isn’t a ton of menus to find everything.

Chair's Challenge 2025/2026

Every year the current club chairperson gets to set a challenge for members that ends in a competition near the end of the season.

Last year we photographed club activities – and I’d encourage you to keep doing that because the images are useful for publicity.

This year we have something a little different and I have given away some clues in the slides so far….

Thanks for your attention tonight – I promise that I am not presenting every night and I hope you will be able to put some of these things to use to get the most out of being a part of our club.