groupings

Despite deliberately not particularly trying too hard to analyse the pictures I take and why I've taken them I sort of had to a bit today during the lunchwalk when I was attempting to take a base picture to post on the work photo club forum to test out a suggestion which has popped up a couple of times when collecting potential subjects for the monthly competition concerning changing the competition one month into what would effectively be a photoshop contest; take a single (or possibly multiple) start images, let people pick one to work on then allow voting on the results instead of on pictures people have taken themselves. I was trying to find something which would be manipulable in a number of ways, including cropping to choose the subject rather than just having to crop around an obvious subject to emphasize it. After peering at a few things I was finding that I was seeming (at least, this lunchtime) to pick on things which would have resulted in one definite general subject, obvious by focus, lighting, placement and occasionally colour. I tried a few walls to get something flat in which more than one thing would be in focus but the walls weren't particularly behaving so I went for a small aperture and a roof/wall-scape. It was eventually posted the next day after converting the source file to TIFF and .dng and uploading them to my webspace but no-one appears to have noticed it yet, though I deliberately chose not to have the post emailed out to the mailing list. Coincidentally the same sort of thing popped up at the meet-up later on in Susie's, but if I ever ask anyone again how they're able to spot me from a thumbnail then don't tell me in case I become too aware of what I'm doing when taking pictures.

The evening meetup was in a nice small and worn-feeling place with a smallish amount of people around a conveniently-shaped table (and on an evening where no guest musicians were playing in the other half) and thus went by quite quickly. For some reason I'd been expecting everyone to be sitting down to a plateful of tasty veggie random cookery each but only a few people had full plates, the remainder poking at the small selection of cake. Judging by the small quantity of shots taken there it was also quite dark, so hopefully the next one can be somewhere slightly brighter but just as quiet and with perhaps a greater emphasis on snack-provision rather than filling-stomach-cheaply-veggie. See the thread for somethng hopefully happening towards the middle-end of February, still inside whilst the scarf-weather remains (though it was most pleasing that as a bearded man wearing shorts I was a member of the two second-largest easily-visible-category subsets amongst the attendees.