Opening night

‘Twas the evening of 15th of September 2021 and a motley crew had gathered online for a meeting… a bit dramatic but it was the much-anticipated return of camera club meetings and our opening night, we were all excited to be back.

Around twenty members (we now have over 40) logged in to say hello, greet new members, and listen to Ron Bell’s back to basics presentation. Ron took us through the fundamentals of camera technology and operation. Mainly aimed at beginners and especially new members it never does any harm for our more experienced gang to mull over the basics again. Perhaps clearing away any of the bad habits we pick up over the years.

Zoom has been a boon for our club and kept the enthusiasm going during the lockdowns and will continue to help until normal service can be resumed. There are other video meeting arrangements but we have found Zoom easy to use for all and at the time of signing up it gave the biggest bang for our buck. Since then of course the likes of MS Teams has expanded and is probably just as good. However, we are all used to Zoom now so why change. It may be that future sessions at the camera club could become a hybrid of in-person and online meetings. It would certainly widen our choice of presenters. That’s a discussion for another day though as Zoom isn’t for everyone.

That said, of course, we always have teething troubles sharing screens, logging in etc. and it is a bit strange chatting to a collection of thumbnails. These things will become old hat within the next few weeks and we’ll be up and running.

Ron’s presentation, “tweaked” from last year, went down very well and prompted good discussions after. We look forward also to next week’s presentation by Paul Crawford which will give us a more practical approach to avoiding those blurry images.