Dallas Camera Club

Since buying my new camera (Nikon Coolpix 5700), I’ve been reading various books on photography as well (including the National Geographic Photography Field Guide), which I’ve found very useful).

In that book, they mentioned what should have been obvious to me: many cities have camera clubs. So, I checked Google for “Dallas camera club” and, what do you know, there is a Dallas Camera Club. They have meetings every 1st and 3rd Tuesday of of the month. The 1st-Tuesday meeting is for their photography competitions, while the 3rd-Tuesdays are regular meetings.

The meetings are held at one of the rooms of Parker Chiropractic College, which is just at 35 & Walnut Hill. So, as yesterday was a 3rd-Tuesday, I decided to check it out. The Chiropractic College was easy to find, and it only had a few buildings so finding the room wasn’t tough either.

When I first stepped in to room 226, I noticed that more than half the room were retirees. I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised, since the field of photography has been around for over a century. But I guess I didn’t expect to have many interests in common with older Americans.

Before the meeting, there were snacks and drinks. The drinks were all 2-liter bottles, but even included Kroger-brand “Caffeine Free Diet Cola” — ahh, the guilt-free brown water I love. Of course, there were also cookies, which probably counteracted any carb-savings I got out of the soda ;).

For what it’s worth, the cookies were of three varieties: those Snackwells Devils Food cookies (ehh), and soft chocolate chip cookies in two sizes (one set about Chips Ahoy sized and another set of about 3” each). Perhaps the cookies are different each month.

The meeting itself was well run and interesting. As with any club of this type, there was the occasional nervous banter of the President between introducing speakers (but, I can live with that, I suppose).

The first presentation was a PowerPoint-based slideshow (using a projector connected to a laptop) of the club’s recent fieldtrip to a Dogwood Farm (it was like a botanical garden for trees, or such). Pleasantly, the slideshow was set to auto-advance evey four or five seconds (woo, no chit-chat between every slide!). As I understand it, the slideshow was made of contributed pictures from club members; so, some were great while others weren’t quite as good.

The second presentation was on creating simulated multiple-exposures using Photoshop. This one amazed some of the Photoshop-newbies, but it basically consisted of sandwiching two photographs over separate layers and varying the transparency between the two. I didn’t mind that so much, but the information wasn’t something that I’d regularly use.

After the meeting, I talked with a few of the members. They were all very friendly and, of course, rather knowledgeable about photography (I counted at least two people who had bought a Canon EOS-10D, which impressed me). I thought the meeting was worthwhile and I’ll probably try to go again.