Did goe to the Western Australian Camera Club meeting laste night and was greately amused.
I had been invited to spread gloom and blast the souls of the members on an exhibition night by judging their images. For a cruel man this sort of thing is better than being offered jewels in a casket, plus you can generally get a cup of coffee and a biscuit.
In the event it all worked out very well. I could hear weeping and gnashing of teeth as I criticized the projected and printed images and at one stage of the evening a chair was thrown at me out of the darkness. I cannot think of a lovelier complement, unless it were to be chased down the street by an enraged mob of photographers brandishing pitchforks and torches. Or monopods and speed lights as the case may be.
Aaaaactually - it all was very civilized. They had sent me a disk of the main images that were to be projected and I reviewed them two days before the evening meeting, making notes of what I wanted to say and assigning the merit and prize winning points. Then they projected them onto a screen with a digital projector and everyone could make their own judgements.
How this banished the memories of slide shows of the 60's! Then it was the clatter of the poorly-constructed and poorly operated Braun Paximats or savagely cast Bell and Howells that filled the night, punctuated by the curses of the projectionist when yet another slide projected upside down - or by the audience when the slide gate and light flap failed and we were blinded by the full blast of a bare screen. And then there were the failed globe sagas. You hoped the new globe would fit and work but there was always the chance that whatever powers urge the SEC had sent to fry the first one would return to pop the second.
I think it is time to look seriously at the digital projector - Epson make some magnificent examples - and to recognize that some of our images may not deserve $ 15 worth of ink and paper and $ 250 worth of framing but they do warrant an evening's attention on a scale larger than A4. And you can accompany images of your holiday in Fiji with hula music, or gunfire, depending on who is in power this week.
