Puget Sound Stereo Camera Club - Meeting Announcements

January Meeting Announcement

PSSCC Members and Friends,

Happy New Year! I hope the holiday season is treating you well.

Our next meeting is coming up on this Saturday. As you know, this is the first meeting where we meet on the THIRD Saturday of the month. We’ll continue meeting on the third Saturday through June. We’ll take a summer break in July and August and then meet on the the third Saturday in September and October. In November and December we’ll meet on the second Saturday to avoid conflicts with the holidays.

This month our club contest theme is Reflections. This is a theme very well suited to 3D photography so I think we’ll see some of our best stuff this time. I’m really looking forward to it.

Our lunch potluck in December was a great success. Thanks to everyone for bringing so many delicious treats. This month we’re back to our regular volunteer sign up list. You can sign up to bring a thing on this page: http://psscc.org/food-sign-up/

In quick news, I’ve had some success with an outreach effort I made at the the Shoreline Community College. I’ll be working on a one-hour presentation on 3D photography for their Photography Department’s spring quarter classes. I’ll share more details this Saturday, and I’ll be asking for suggestions as well.

Our Facebook page got some interest in the past few weeks. Sadly, I wasn’t watching it closely and didn’t realize that I had to APPROVE new members. Hmmm… I’ll try to watch more closely, but I don’t really spend much time on Facebook anymore. Are there any Facebook fans out there that might want to help moderate the page?

See y’all soon!

By David Brown|January 14th, 2019|Uncategorized|Comments Off

September Meeting Wrap-Up

PSSCC Members and Friends,

Our season opener was eventful. Here’s a brief summary of what happened.

Don Munsil treated us to a quick review of his summer trip to Scotland. He told us about an exhibit at the National Museum of Scotland in Edenborough called Photography: A Victorian Sensation that featured a great deal of stereoscopic photography. In addition, he told us about the Swiss precision drum team at the Royal Edinburgh Military Tattoo called the Top Secret Drum Corps.

Don’s book reviews included a German paperback about the Kaiser Panorama, and 3D Berlin (sorry, no link). His new disk acquisitions include The Young and Prodigious T. S. Spivet (Amazon disk and filmmaker interview) from the same guy that gave us Delicatessen and Amalie. He also pointed out the wide variety of 3D BluRay disks with David Attenborough available through Amazon.co.uk. Phyllis Maslin introduced us to a special disk called 3D Rarities that was featured at this year’s NSA convention in Salt Lake City.

We started collecting club dues for PSSCC ($30/year). If you missed the September meeting, you can catch up at next month’s meeting.

Joan Story told us that she’s preparing to move into a new house, and decided to sell her husband’s collection of cameras. Her husband Joe, who passed a few years ago, was an avid photographer and collected cameras for many years. Joan and Joe have been long-time members and supporters of PSSCC, and she felt Joe would have liked to see the proceeds of the sale come to PSSCC. Joan graciously presented the club with a check for $4,000 to help support the club and to improve our 3D experience. Thank you Joan (and Joe) for this very generous gift! In future meetings we’ll discuss ways we can use the donation most effectively.

PSSCC_ISS_1stPlace_2015 Last year, our humble Puget Sound Stereo Camera Club won first place in the Photographic Society of America’s International Stereo Club Competition. This month, we got a chance to see the certificate in glorious 4D right in front of our own eyes! For those of you who missed it, here’s a 3D representation >>

We saw clips from some of the disks that Don and Phyllis discussed, including a 1940’s 3D promotional featurette about the Pennsylvania Keystone Railroad, a clip from the BBC’s National History Museum Alive about archaeopteryx, and a great selection of 3D images from the Best of Stereoscopy group on Flickr. Next year’s NSA 3D-Con convention is in Tulsa, and we saw a promotional film put out by the event organizers that highlighted the photogenic side of Tulsa, including a surprising amount of Art Deco architecture.

Stuart Turley gave a live demonstration of how to use StereoPhotoMaker to remove the distortion we often see in photos of tall, vertical structures. Stuart agreed to write up the process to include in the “How To” section of our website.

It was a great meeting and a great start to our 2015-2016 season.

See you in October, when our monthly contest theme will be Orange.

By David Brown|September 13th, 2015|Club Meetings|Comments Off

September Meeting Announcement

Here we go! Let’s kick off our 2015-2016 Season!! I hope everyone had a wonderful break and took lots of pictures.

Our first meeting of the season is next Saturday at 12:00 PM at the Federal Way Senior Center.

As is our tradition, September’s photo contest theme is “Summer Share Out” where we show off what we did over the summer.

Our monthly themes for this year will be:

September – Summer share out
October – Anything in the color orange
November – Jack-o’-lanterns
December – Sparkles
January – Food
February – Nature
March – Industrial
April – Contrast
May – Transportation (no cars)
June – Open

Thanks again to Shannon Milner for providing the list.

Sadly, there’s still no way to add photos to the website easily and quickly. Since our pics have special display requirements (L-R-L format for full-size viewing and non-3D versions for thumbnails), I haven’t had time to go back and rename, resize and reformat each of the contest winners and place them on the site individually. Social media sites make sharing photos easy, in particular Flickr which is the most popular, and Phereo which makes displaying 3D photos very easy. But since we chose as a group not to post on these sites, I have to stop promising that I’ll eventually catch up and put our contest winners on our own website. Sorry. I feel bad about it, but I’m a lot busier now than I was when I started this project.

On a lighter note, I’ve upgraded the food sign-up list this year to make it easier to track the status of lunch items each month. You’ll now get a confirmation email when you sign up, an automatic reminder the day before, and the option to un-volunteer if something comes up preventing you from bringing food to a particular meeting. Hopefully, this will make it a little easier to sign up, and maybe even to sign up further in advance. Our valiant lunch coordinators will also get automatic notifications when someone signs up or removes themselves from the list.

Finally, I’d like to encourage everyone to try to introduce at least one additional person to the club this year. We are the advocates for 3D photography in the Puget Sound region. There must we ways we can reach out and bring more people into this extraordinary hobby. At least drag a guest to a meeting. THEY may know someone.

See you on Saturday!

By David Brown|September 6th, 2015|Club Business|Comments Off

June Meeting Announcement

This Saturday, June 13 will be our final meeting for the 2014-2015 season. Be sure to come see the best of the best for the year. This month’s photo competition theme is “Open” so you can select anything you want. Bring your best work of the year, if not to compete, then just to share.

Also, there’s no food sign-up sheet this month. It’s our annual potluck, so everyone brings something to share. As a general rule, we suggest you bring enough to feed eight.

See you there!

By David Brown|June 11th, 2015|Club Business|Comments Off

The blue sky and white clouds are playing tag, the birds are calling, the trees are in bloom, and the warm sun on our faces reminds us that it’s a loving world after all. There couldn’t be a better time to huddle in the dark and look at photos of the great outdoors!

Next weekend is our April meeting. Our club photo contest is “Plants” and I KNOW you’ve got pictures of plants, so bring ’em and show ’em.

Food!

It’s Spring and you know what that means! It means you want lunch on Saturday. In case you haven’t noticed, we’ve been relying heavily on Joyce, Marilyn and their support teams (‘husbands’) to make sure we’re fed. They spend a lot of time managing the tiny details, presenting a buffet, and cleaning up after us. We owe them more than thanks. We owe them a debt. Their efforts turn our slideshows into events. On behalf of the whole club, let me say how grateful I am for all that you do. We can help support them by making sure that that they don’t have to BUY the food as well. Bring some stuff. Here’s the sign-up page.

We’ve also got our ISC contest this month, so Bob Venezia asked me to pass along this message:

It’s March Madness in April. This is our equivalent of the NCAA final four!

The final International Stereo Club Competition (ISCC) of the season will be held in May. We will need to pick our entries at the April meeting. Currently we are in First Place! Should we have a good showing in May, we have a very good shot at the top spot.

Why are we doing so well? We hosted the ISCC in November. If this were bowling, that would be like bowling a strike. Strikes are good, but to really capitalize on them you need to do well in both of the next 2 frames. We did great in the first frame after the strike. Now there’s one more to go, and it is our time to shine.

Bring your favorite 3D images to the meeting. The rules are:

Must have originated as a photograph taken by you.

Must not have previously won an award in the ISCC (but if your image has been chosen previously to represent the club, and it did not win a ribbon, your image may be re-entered).

The specifications are that the image should be a parallel pair, side by side with dimensions of 2800×1050 pixels (1400×1050 for each side). If your photo does not meet that spec, Bob will reformat it for you before sending it into the competition.

Website updates:

As of right now, the hacker’s have been vanquished, and the website is back up. The club’s steering committee has agreed to spend $40 to pay for some additional security software for the site. Let’s hope it’s enough.

I haven’t yet found an effective way to add photos to the site. I’ve got copies of all the winners for this past season, but putting them on the site without the support of social media sites is a time-consuming process, and time is a luxury I don’t have right now. Please be patient till I find a way to manage the photos. A photo club site without photos is not what I intended, for sure. I’m working on it.

See you this weekend.

David

By David Brown|April 4th, 2015|Club Business, Uncategorized|Comments Off

March Meeting Announcement

T march-meeting-announcement his month, our photo contest is “Love” which, for the record, excludes selfies with your photo equipment! Bring your loveliest pics to share and show off. We’d all love to see them.

Elliott Swanson has posted images on Flickr of his trip to Harry Potter World. See them here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/85452191@N00/

See ya’ll in March.

By David Brown|March 1st, 2015|Club Business, Uncategorized|Comments Off

Our December club meeting was one of the most enjoyable meetings I’ve attended in a long time. I’m not sure why, but the combination of photos, videos and conversation struck me as particularly rewarding. It reminded me just how great it is to be part of a group such as ours. Thanks to everyone for the creativity, the hard work, and the easy smiles.

I wanted to remind everyone who was there, and inform anyone who missed the meeting, that we discussed in broad terms what our club policy should be regarding posting our 3D contest winners on the Internet. Presumably this policy would apply to any other photos that are given to me with the intention of publishing on the website. I’ve drafted an official sounding policy that I’d like to get comments on before we post it as truly official on our official website 🙂

PSSCC Photo Publication (Draft) Policy:

Photos submitted to PSSCC photo contests may be published on our club website, psscc.org, unless the artist specifically requests that they not be published.
Artist’s publishing preferences may be submitted on an individual photo basis or as a blanket policy covering all photos submitted by the artist. It is the artist’s responsibility to ensure his/her intentions are understood by PSSCC club members and volunteers responsible for publication.
Photos will not be published on any other public forum (including, but not limited to social media and photo sharing sites) without the express permission of the artist on a photo-by-photo basis.
PSSCC club members and volunteers will make a best efforts attempt to comply with all artists’ wishes, and artists agree to indemnify PSSCC club members and volunteers for any perceived or monetary damages in case of any failure to comply with any stated or unstated publishing preferences.
Submitting images for PSSCC photo contests implies understanding and consent to the club’s publishing policy.
PSSCC’s publishing policy takes effect January 1, 2015.

January Meeting Reminders

Date: Our January meeting is next Saturday, on January 10.

Contests: We’ll have TWO contests next month:

Our PSSCC monthly contest theme is: Decorations.
Our ISCC contest is also this month, and Bob Venezia asked me to pass along the following info:
February will be the next edition of the International Stereo Club Competition and so this month we will need to pick our entries. Bring your best photos that have not previously gotten awards in the competition.
The photos should be parallel format (two images joined together into one file with the left image on the left and the right image on the right). Each of the left and right component images should be 1400×1050 pixels, with the resulting file being 2800×1050. File weight should not exceed 2.5 MB per image. JPEGs and PNGs are acceptable.
For more granular specifics, please refer to:http://psscc.org/iscc-competion/
and good luck!!!

Food: Do you miss the food-craziness of the holidays? Me too! Let’s bring some yummy stuff to our club meeting! The sign-up sheet is ready and waiting for you.

See you next weekend!

By David Brown|January 4th, 2015|Club Business|Comments Off

December Meeting Announcement

Next weekend we gather once again to give thanks… I mean… to show off our photos. : )

Next Saturday our club photo contest theme is “Fairy Tales” and I’m sure you all have great photos of Fairies and of Tales, and of the Tails on Fairies, and such… so bring ’em, show ’em and win big, BIG prizes!

I’m going to bring a Google Cardboard Virtual Reality viewer that i got in the mail this week. Sadly, it’s not compatible with my phone, but if anyone with an Android phone wants to give it a try, you can download the Google Cardboard app from the Play store and try my viewer on Saturday.

At the meeting I’d like to take a minute to talk about our publishing policy regarding photos submitted for competition at our club contests. It’s never been stated explicitly that photos submitted for our private viewing are authorized to be published on the web. We should talk about it as a group, and determine an acceptable policy.

You may have noticed that the PSSCC.org website is pretty out of date. I had some trouble with WordPress, but that’s fixed now! Now, if I could just keep up with the content!

And finally, no meeting reminder would be complete without an exhortation to BRING FOOD! Get your tummy in shape for holiday excess by bringing a big bunch of something delicious to share. See the sign-up page to stake your claim on a food category.

See ya soon!

David

By David Brown|December 6th, 2014|Club Business|Comments Off