Cranleigh Camera Club

CCC is a small friendly club catering for people of all ages and photographic abilities and is affiliated to the Photographic Alliance of Great Britain through the Surrey Photographic Association.

If you enjoy photography and may be looking to improve your photographic skills, or wish to share your photographic experiences with other like minded people, then please come along to one of our meetings. The "About Us" tab above provides more information about the club and how to find us. You can also find us on the Cranleigh Camera Club Group Facebook page on the internet. (See "Useful Links" on this page to access our Facebook site.)

 

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Roundup of recent club activities

(For a full summary of all previous club meetings go to Activities archive page and select the year.)

The club is now on its summer break and meetings next season will resume on 18 September 2025

12 June - The AGM was followed by the awards ceremony with the Chairman presenting club trophies and/or certificates to this season's main competition winners, namely:

The Chairman also awarded certificates to all the 2024-25 Annual exhibition section winners as follows:

5 June  A small group of club members met in Chilworth to photograph the ruins of the old gunpowder factory however deteriorating weather and poor light meant an early retreat to the Percy Arms pub was in order and where a welcome pint of the best awaited the intrepid photographers.
In the short time we had while the weather held here are some of the photos that some members managed to capture.

    

    

29 May Colour versus monochrome assignment. It was a relaxed and a fun evening with fellow member Pete Baldrey expertly managing proceedings on the night. Members brought along at least one or two unmounted prints after making two versions of each image, one in colour and one in black and white. The two versions of the same image were brought to the light box and placed side by side with only the backs of both prints visible. One of the images was then selected at random and turned over to face the audience and Pete critiqued it in terms of its impact as a photograph but with a lesser focus on its technical competence. This image was then turned face down again and the second image turned to face the audience whereby Pete critiqued this version before inviting comments from the audience. Finally both images were viewed side by side and members were invited to vote with a show of hands which image they thought best ie the colour or the monochrome version. Finally the author of the photographs was asked for his/her opinion on whether they agreed with the members verdict. This was repeated for all the members' images and the whole process was an excellent way of seeing how colour, or the lack of it, could make a big difference to an image while at the same time gleening other peoples reaction to the pictures.

 

22 May Our thanks to Rob Bonfield for judging the 2024-25 Best print and PDI competition. The overall winning entry and best PDI was Fly on a Wood Avens seed by Tim Cheshire. Julian Hall's Ferrari under the Lights in Singapore took first place for colour prints and Emerge from Darkness by Pete Baldrey was the best mono print.

Fly on a Wood Avens seed by Tim Cheshire

    
Ferrari under the Lights in Singapore by Julian Hall and Emerge from darkness by Pete Baldrey

The full table of awards for best colour prints, mono prints and PDIs is shown below.

15 May  - Chairman's challenge - Creative photographic imagery. The challege was to produce a photographic image with a distinct creative style. There were 33 PDI enties for the chairman to judge and the gold award this year went to Pete Baldrey's image Flying chair. Silver went to Elizabeth Bulley's image Creative colouring and bronze went to Ron Boon for his image Horsham blue.

Flying chair by Pete Baldrey

    
Creative colouring by Elizabeth Bulley and Horsham blue by Ron Boon

The full list of awards is shown below.

8 May - Club member Pete Baldrey gave an insight into how he uses Lightroom and Photoshop when post processing his images. Pete is well known in the club for his portrait photography but in order to demonstrate live the capabilities of the Adobe software he also included some of his landscaape photographs as well. After a photo shoot Pete always sets up three folders to store the photos; a camera raw file, a high resolution file for the subsequently exported tiff images and a low resolution file for jpegs for sharing his images. This he finds useful for organising files in Lightroom's excellent cataloguing system. Using his laptop he demonstrated how, as a starting point, he often uses his own custom presets in the Lightroom develop module to begin processing the raw images and then making any further small adjustments, masking etc, for achieving the desired end result. He also demonstrated the seamless integration between Lightroom and Photoshop, the latter mainly for any more complex work required on the images. He finished his talk with an AV slide show recording a recent photoshoot in Brighton with one of his favourite models.

1 May - There were 26 PDIs and 26 mono prints entered in the 5th round of the open PDI and Mono print competitions judged by Graeme Wales ARPS, CPAGB, BPE2. In the PDI competition he scored three images from Pete Baldrey, Julian Hall and Mike Harrison the maximum 10 points. In the Mono print competition he awarded 10 to the images from Ron Boon and Stefan Foryszewski .

PDI Open section:

    
To the side by Pete Baldrey and African sunrise by Julian Hall

Peace lilly by Mike Harrison

Mono open section:

    
Shoreham on Sea by Ron Boon and Wargraves by Stefan Foryszewski

24 April - Anything goes! - 6 club members gave a short talk on a photographic subject of their choice as follows:

• Norman Price on how to improve a flat low contrast image by making two layers in Photoshop from the original raw image, one corrected for exposing the sky and the other for the foreground. By applying masks to both layers he blends the layers to achieve an improved image with a much higher dynamic contrast range.
• Mike Guy spoke about some of the issues you may face with drone photography. These range from obtaining a pilot license for the specific category of drone, seeking appropriate training, taking regard of any legal restrictions on flying a drone in the chosen location, and understanding the effects of weather which could have dire consequences for flying and result in the loss of the drone.
• Ed Hull concentrated on examining the work of the iconic photographer Helmut Newton, a world renowned creative artist and fashion/portrait photographer, with a presentation giving a short history of his life and examples of his imagery.
• Ron Boon discussed the use of his magnetic Lee filters for slow shutter speed photography including the use of loupes to assist with viewing images on camera screens.
• Pete Baldrey, one of the club's more prominent portrait photographers, gave us an insight into another side of his photography with an interesting slide show containing various landscape images etc that were "Anything Other than Portraits".
• Ann Smith also gave a slide show with images taken recently of the Opera House in Oslo. A modern architect designed building with extreme angular design features. Her images included many reflections from glass surfaces and exploited the use of diagonals for creative imagery.

17 April - No meeting - our Easter break

10 April - This was our 5th and final colour print competition of the season and judged by Roy Williamson. After holding back 12 of the 36 entries the judge awarded 10 to the images from Phil Copestick, Stefan Foryszewski and Ken Lillywhite.

The winning images were:

    
Damselfly by Phil Copestick and Take off by Stefan Foryszewski

Tulip by Ken Lillywhite.

3 April - Ludshott hosted the 2-way interclub competion which was judged by Ann Healey FRPS DPAGB EFIAP/g BPE5. Congratulations to Ludshott Camera Club who were the overall winners of the competition with a strong selection of images. Although they won the Nature section convincingly

Cranleigh narrowly beat them in the Open section. The overall points awarded were:

Section	Cranleigh Camera Club	Ludshott Camera Club
Nature	66	75.5
Open	134	133.5
Total	200	209

29 March - The club held its annual exhibition at the Cranleigh Village Hall. We had 251 prints and 149 projected digital images on display in 12 categories and many visitors commented on the high standard of prints on show. Steve Kingswell ARPS AFIAP judged the exhibition entries and declared Midday shadows as the Best in Exhibition.

Midday shadows by Ron Boon

A summary of the exhibition category winners is shown in the table below. (The full table of all awards can be found in the members only section.)

27 March  - Our Reg Mullard wild flora and fauna competiton was judged by Roger Mendham LRPS. There were 28 prints and 23 PDIs and, in what proved to be a strong competition, he judged Julian Hall's print of two dragonflies mating as the overall winner, narrowly beating Ann Smith's winning PDI of Pelican preening.

Those receiving awards in both print and PDI sections are shown in the table below.

    
PRINT - Dragon flies mating by Julian Hall     and     PDI - Pelican preening by Ann Smith

 

 

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