Club Newsletter 13th November 2020
As a result of our committee meeting on Wednesday evening there are quite a few things I need to bring you up to date on.
Future Meetings
Firstly, it was recognised that there is very little prospect of us being able to meet together for the rest of the current season so to make planning easier we are assuming that all our meetings through to the end of April will be conducted by Zoom. Except for one little glimmer of hope – with the likely arrival of a vaccine soon, we are thinking that maybe we might be able to meet together at the North Nibley Village Hall for the end of season competitions and for a celebration social evening. With this in mind we have provisionally booked the Hall, so keep your fingers crossed!
Subscriptions
This is a tricky one, but it was accepted that there were still significant expenses for the club even though we are not physically meeting e.g. subscription to Zoom and also some of the top quality lecturers are still asking quite a bit for their Zoom presentations. You will probably remember that back in July it was decided that everyone who had been a member in the 2019-20 season would be assumed to want continue their membership into the 2020-21 season and that, at least in the short term, no subscription would be charged until we had some idea of how the club finances were going, and of course there would be no attendance fee charged on the night. It was decided at our meeting that it would be appropriate at this stage to ask for a nominal subscription to cover the likely expenses for the current season and it was agreed that £10 per member would be a realistic figure to ask.
However, it was realised that a few of you do not appear to have availed yourselves of any of the benefits of membership in this current season, possibly because you are unable or unwilling to participate in Zoom meetings, although maybe some of you in this category have been visiting the club Facebook page to view the recordings of our meetings which are now being made. To keep our records up to date it would be useful to know if anyone in this category has made the decision to resign their membership, so please let us know if this is the case. If this is not, then we hope you will be happy to pay the amount we are asking.
Programme
We are currently looking to plug three gaps in the second half of this season, left by speakers originally booked but unwilling to present by Zoom, and one speaker we are thinking of having back again is George Robertson who so many of you were enthralled by last night – what a superb evening!
I will very soon be starting to book speakers for our 2021-22 season with the assumption that we will be back meeting as normal, so we will be restricted to those within reasonable travelling distance. Bearing this in mind, if any of you have suggestions about possible speakers (or indeed any other suggestions for club activities), including ones we have seen in the past, that you would like to see again, then please let me know. One suggestion has already been made, that we should actually plan for a limited number of Zoom meetings in our normal programme, so that we can avail ourselves of top quality speakers outside of our geographical area (George Robertson last night was speaking to us from near Glasgow!). What do members think of this idea?
On the matter of presenting by Zoom, it has been pointed out by some of the committee that images we have been submitting for presentation e.g. PDI competitions, are appearing a bit ’soft’ when viewed on screens. For this reason, we are saying that from now on, for Zoom presentations only, images can be sized up to 2000pixels on the longest dimension, whether the image is portrait or landscape format.
You will be pleased to know that we are still intending to have our usual Christmas knockout competition by Zoom (17th December) and Steve Stone has found out how we can all very easily vote online. So what we want from you is a maximum of three images which we have not seen before and sized as described above. These should be sent to Steve Daniell no later than 3rd December. The prize will be one of Gloria’s lovely Christmas cakes. This is unlikely to occupy a whole evening so if any of you have any suggestions about what else we could include then please let us know.
External Competitions
Steve Varman has submitted our club’s entry for the WCPF Kingswood Salver competition, which comprises a folio of five images on the theme of architecture, each image being from a different member. Judging by Leigh Woolford is taking place by Zoom tomorrow, and you are all invited to join. Details of how to join were emailed to you last Wednesday.
Steve is also asking for members to submit to him images to be considered for the WCPF PDI Competition, no later than 13th December. We have to enter 18 images with no more than four from any one member. Details were emailed out to you yesterday.
Publicity
If some of you are wondering why we never seem to be having any reports about our activities in the local Gazette it’s not for want of trying – Chris Ryske is submitting a report every week but all to no avail, but then that’s the Gazette!!
Tyndale Walks
David Brookes is hoping to organize a seasonal walk around Tetbury sometime around Christmas or New Year but of course this will very much depend on the weather.
New Website
We are very fortunate to have someone with the skills of Steve Stone among our membership, because Steve has been spending a lot of time creating a new website for our club which is starting to look very impressive. So we thank Steve for all his efforts. We will let you know when this is available. At the same time, we should thank Barry for all the work he has done looking after our current website over the years. Barry will be leaving the committee soon, but we are pleased to be able to say that Diana Baker has agreed to join the committee as a co-opted member.
Facebook Group
Which brings me to the next topic – our club Facebook Page. After much discussion it was agreed that access to this should be strictly limited to paid up members of the club plus past members but only at the discretion of the committee.
Finally, I would just like to thank you all for your loyalty to the club over these difficult times. I had feared that with the current pandemic the club might fragment and never be quite the same again, but attendances at all of our Zoom meetings has consistently been in the upper 30s – sometimes this is more than we would expect at a normal club evening. I have heard recently of a camera club folding completely because of current circumstances and others being reduced to just a very few stalwarts. I think we have so much going for us as a club in so many ways – long may it continue!
Brian (Club Chairman)