Camera Club meeting helps non-member photogs

By Rex Dolby

The Wassenberg Camera Club’s open meeting held this past Thursday at the Wassenberg Art Center was well attended. The meeting appears to have fulfilled the wishes of those attending, which was to learn more about using their cameras and photography in general, as well as to learn how to improve printing. President Doug Heckler’s presentation on adding detail in yellow flowers and the walls lined with award-winning photographs also provided reasons to attend.

The first part of the meeting was devoted to small groups answering questions pertaining to people’s cameras, and using the pictures on the walls to illustrate suggestions on where to place the subject in a picture composition.

Heckler’s presentation came after the small group discussions. He  said that he had observed that yellow roses, daffodils and the like seemed to loose details in the petals and he found that his steps to correct that problem had been effective. He advised that the first step was to create a duplicate picture and make all adjustments to it so the original picture remains unchanged, which is a good practice in any photo editing.

His next step was to create a duplicate layer and by whatever means your editing program permits, turn it into a grayscale picture. Change the opacity (how much of the lower layers can show through) to very low, and overlay the bottom layers changing blending to “Dodge”. This will maintain overall luminosity and color saturation in the layers directly below the black and white layer. While this can also be accomplished by applying the dodging (lightening) and burning (darkening) tools to the desired areas, the size of flower petal veins make this an extremely tedious job. After again checking the opacity, merge the layers and save as a different file to maintain the integrity of the original.

We thank Doug Heckler for bringing us this informative presentation.

Membership to the Wassenberg Camera Club is open to the public with an art center membership. We accept any level of skill and invite anyone interested in photography to attend.  The Wassenberg Art Center’s hours during exhibits are: Tuesday through Sunday 1–5 p.m. and you may contact the art center at 419.238.6837, by email: info@wassenbergartcenter.org or via our website at: wassenbergartcenter.org. The Wassenberg Art Center is located at 643 South Washington Street in Van Wert.