Alec Cowley.

Tonight (Thurday 7th Dec) we saw something a bit different as club member Alec Cowley treated us to a night of AV.  Alec has been producing high quality AV’s for some considerable time and this shows in the quality of the work he showed this evening.

Alec started his presentation by showing an AV of Newcastle at night followed by a wonderful AV of Cragside House with some excellent images and special effects including zooming and panning and some interesting and imaginative translations showing the house in all its glory.

The AV entitled ‘Those Magnificent Men In their Flying Machines’ went down particularly well with members. Aircraft including the Battle of Britain Flight and the venerable Vulcan featured alongside aircraft of a bygone age all again with great visual effects and translations and a rousing soundtrack.

An interesting AV using images taken in the early 1900's depicting a colourless and hard  life for most shown against the beautifully colourful stained glass windows and finery of the churches  of the region.

Alec explained that although he used Pro Show Pro to ‘assemble’ the AV a lot of the initial image editing and manipulation was done in Photoshop.  Alec showed how he used ‘layers’ in Photoshop to cutout and edit various parts of an image, such as an aircraft to enable him to change the background.

At the end of the evening Alec was thanked for his presentation and the members showed their appreciation in the usual way for an interesting and entertaining evening.​

Bob Finlay. (President)

Macro/Close-up Battle

Thursday night (30th Nov) was the Macro/Close-up battle. Over 40 images were entered by members to 'battle it out', head to head in a knockout competition to finally reach a winner.
Some amazing macro images of flies, dragon flies & butterflies battled it out against some excellent close-up shots of birds, flowers, coins and other objects.

Round by round the images were eliminated until in the final round only 2 remained.  'Feathers' by Alan Carr & 'Greenbottle' by Jim Miekle.  A final vote for the outright winner went to Jim's ' Greenbottle'. (Image Below).

A very 'Well Done' to Jim and to Alan for being a worthy runner up and a big thank you to all who entered for making it an entertaining and fun evening.
​
Bob Finlay (President)

     'Greenbottle' by Jim Miekle