Meetings
Our regular club meetings take place at Swavesey Village College on Thursday nights. We encourage everyone to come along in person, but we also try to run a Zoom feed every week for those who cannot attend in person for whatever reason. Our aim is for these meetings to be friendly and fun, and we always have a break for refreshments and chat (the cost of the refreshments is covered by your membership fee). Our Thursday meetings fall into the following three groups:
- Speakers: We try each season to invite speakers covering a range of genres of interest to our members - recent topics have included landscape, wildlife, aviation, sport, architecture and mobile phone photography. We're always happy to receive requests or suggestions for speakers from our members.
- Competitions: On competition evenings we invite an external judge to come along and provide feedback and constructive criticism on our images. Judging is very subjective and can lead to interesting conversations but these evenings are a great way to improve your own photography and to learn how to see images with a more critical eye. It's not compulsary to enter competitions (and some of our members choose not to) but all paid-up members are eligible to enter, and having a wide range of entries to discuss definitely makes for an entertaining and informative evening.
- Workshops and members' evenings: We organise a number of members' evenings during the season. Sometimes these take the form of practical experience-sharing workshops and sometimes they consist of a number of short presentations from club members - if you have a particular photographic interest or passion we want to hear about it - and yes, we do want to see your holiday photos!
Critique evenings
Assessing your own work is very hard to do, however experienced you are. For this reason we hold critique evenings via Zoom a few weeks before each competition, usually on a Tuesday. These are open to any member and provide an opportunity to get feedback from other members on images you're thinking of entering in a competition - and to share your thoughts on others' images. The critique sessions are friendly events with a focus on sympathetic but constructive criticism that can help anyone, however experienced, to improve their work.
Social events
In addition to impromptu trips to the pub after our Thursday meetings, we also organise an annual dinner with an invited speaker at the end of each season in May, and a summer BBQ.
Outings
Outings happen on an ad hoc basis throughout the year. Most are organised by individual members, but we also occasionally organise more formal workshop outings such as the recent trip to Orford Ness with landscape photographer Justin Minns. The Committee are always happy to hear suggestions, and also to support individual members who want to organise a trip or who are just looking for a partner in crime for a visit to a particular venue or event. Keep an eye on this website for details of upcoming outings and events.