The September assignment is very easy. Please bring your best photographs of your favorite subject. You may share your photographs as digital files or as finished prints. Prints should be at least 8X10 and larger is always better.

Our speaker for this month will be one of our own members, Virginia Seche. Virginia will talk about producing slide show presentations using Pro Show Gold. This easy to use program allows you to produce impressive and professional looking presentations using a number of different visual effects that are synchronized with downloaded music.

We will also have a very short presentation on Light Room by Marcelo Lewin, another one of our members. This will be a preview of of our October program where Marcelo will go deeper into this powerful image management tool.

Our new assignment for August will be: Forgotten Places or Things. Let's see what you can come up with. If you do not have time to shoot the assignment, please feel free to bring any photographs that you would like to share, or have questions about.

As of right now, I do not have a speaker for the August Meeting. So we will stick with our normal format of sharing photographs and having an open discussion.

Also please note that I am going to ask everyone to kick in a whole dollar to offset some of the minor expenses of hosting this Meetup.

Our speaker for June will be Dave Murphy who will share his
personal experiences in self-publishing a book of his
photographs. He will describe the decisions he made in
planning the book, in image selection and editing, in selecting
the book layout and cover design, and in the selection of a
book layout program. He will describe his printing choices and
their comparative costs. He will show a home-printed copy of
his book, as well as the final version from a local Print
Shop. He concludes that printing costs have now become so
reasonable that many photographers will choose to self-publish
their work in the future.
Dave was born and raised in England. Educated as an
aeronautical engineer he chose to travel the world before
settling into a career of designing commercial airliners at
Douglas Aircraft. His varied activities and extensive travels
have provided opportunities for a large collection of
photographs spanning a period of over fifty years. He has made
presentations on Digital Photography and Photographic
Composition to photography groups and was a judge at this years Los Alamitos Photography Competition.

Our assignment for the June meeting will be: Portraits without people. This idea was from one of our members and I think that it will be challenging as well as fun. I am looking forward to seeing how you interpret this theme.

Our speaker for April will be Mr. Steve Georges, Chief Photographer for the Press Telegram. He will be sharing some of his award winning images with us and explaining the real story behind each photograph. As an added plus he will also share the papers digital, and very high tech work flow with us. I am sure that this is going to be a kick film presentation that you won't want to miss.

I think that we should change our monthly assignment to: Photographs suitable for the news.

The assignment for March is to illustrate the concept of "Heart". You can interpret this in any way that you like. Don't like this idea, then you can make up your own self assignment and bring it to share. Having fun is the most important part of this group.

We have a guest speaker for the March Meetup. Mr Tim Mathiesen, a former Fuji Tech Rep, will share some of his photography with us. He will also be talking about: Digital Color Management. Tim is a sucessful photographer with a fantastic resume. You are not going to want to miss this one.

Also for the New Year we need to start thinking about how we are going to formalize our group and elect some good people to leadership positions. If you have any good ideas, please email them to me.

If you bring prints, they should be at least eight-by-ten, but larger would be better. Since this is a digital group, you can also bring a digital file to project. We can input from CD, thumb drive, or compact flash card. If you have something else, bring a down load device, and we'll see if we can make it work.

Have a problem or a photographic question? Write it down and we will have the group discuss it. The 'old pros' enjoy helping those who are new to the craft.