Unusual topic scheduled for meeting

By Rex Dolby

The Van Wert Area Photography Club’s next meeting will start at 7 p.m. on Thursday, April 13, at 114 S. Race St..  I’ve attended a lot of camera club meetings and this one promises to be like no other!

President Stuart Jewett has labeled the photo competition as a CHALLENGE.    He says that the photo challenge for April 13th is to bring in your most interesting shots of a toilet as the main subject.  He offers such possible suggestions as: a toilet as a planter, with flowers growing out of it, or a toilet with a perfect model sitting on it, etc. Jewett states that this is a real, and serious challenge. To win, you will have to be very creative in your thinking and anyone is welcome to join this challenge. Just bring no more than four 4×6 printed photos, and if you’d like, an optional backup on a thumb drive, to our regular meeting on the 2nd Thursday of April. Judging will be based only on the photos submitted.

Moving to a piece of trivia, I’ve been curious how the term “aperture” got started in the field of photography.    I did some research and discovered that it was more of an “oh” moment than ‘OH’. (I almost reflexively added IO)

I learned it was a Middle English word dating back to 1400-50 that was derived from the Latin word. apertura,  which means “opening”.   The word “stop” was connected to aperture in 1858 when John Waterhouse invented a system for controlling the amount of light entering the camera by creating discs with various diameter holes in them.  In 1895, John Hodges proposed a “fractional number” which may have led to the term “F-stop”.  In 1901 C. Welborne Piper proposed the “fractional diameter” which evolved into the “f-number”.

In 1961 the American Standards Association (ASA) declared that the “f-number” was the proper term for setting camera aperture, but many people thought that “f-stop” was easier to say and write so it has pretty much stuck. From all this you might be able to conclude that the f is related to the amount of light you have allowed to reach the sensor or film by stopping all additional light. (Dolby’s simplified version.)