One of the reasons this Photo Club exists is to share some knowledge… how a shot was taken, what lighting was used, what settings on the camera, that kind of thing. Nothing too technical — I basically passed my college photography program because my teacher refused to fail me. I tried. But she wouldn’t. So I’m pretty good in the darkroom, but I couldn’t explain ‘focal length’ to you for all the gold in the Yukon.

So this is mostly a Club for ‘shooters’, people who point and shoot — actually, our motto is “we always shoot first”. Composition is pretty much what we look for in a good photo. It took me, for example, years to figure out how to make sure the tops of everyone’s head were in the photo.

We have a whole whack of new members to our Club. Some of them with more experience than others. Some of them are even borderline professional, or have been shooting for decades. We even have contacts with the many professional photographers in this region, and we’ll be sharing their knowledge here and on our Facebook page.

We’ve been featuring new members here on the blog for the past week… and we’ll continue over the next few weeks — next week we’ll mostly be publishing shots from the 170th Vankleek Hill Agricultural Fair. The idea is to for them to post a little bio here, along with their personal favourite five photos (that they’ve ever taken), what camera they shoot with, and what they like to shoot… just to get them started.

So far we’ve featured Cathy Badcock, Pamela Dewar, and Denise Dejardins, and Sandra Bennett…

Sandra: “These Photos are called ‘Nature In My Backyard’. They’ve all been taken around our house. I’m using a Canon Rebel T41, with no official training — I have not taken any courses in photography, and do not have Photoshop… I only use PhotoBucket to modify my pictures. But it’s a passion, especially for anything nature, animals… some day I would like to take real studio portrait of families… our kids … babies… or even pets. That’s about it :)”.

These shots are fantastic, Melissa… thanks for joining the Club.