N.E.W. Seeking Focus Meeting Minutes - 6/9/2009

Tuesday, June 9, 2009
Time: 6:00pm - 9:00pm
Location: Appleton Yacht Club

Meeting agendas were handed out, and a brief discuss followed regarding using agendas to provide flow and structure to the meeting format.

Two new members were introduced, Lisa Ann Krutzic and Chuck Dunning.

Re-introduction of existing members followed, in order to acquaint/re-acquaint ourselves with each other.

The next portion of the meeting was dedicated to discussing some new things that are going to be implemented, or are being researched, for our group. Some of these include the following:

• Flickr - Streamline and centralize photo sharing for our group. Documentation is being put together in order to show our members how to create an account, upload photos, share their photos with the group, and utilize Flickr's discussion thread feature.


• Blogs - Being researched to determine its usefullness as a communication tool for our group.


• Photographer of the Month - We will select one group member each month to ask questions of and view their top 10 photos. This is an effort to get to know our members better.


• Photo Critiquing - We will be considering doing this again. Our first phase of this however, may be to critique "third party" photos (i.e. not the members of our group). The purpose of this is to share our thoughts, likes, dislikes, techniques, etc. with each other, while [hopefully] preventing it from becoming something which can sometimes be negative or "attacking".


• Monthly Themes - A theme will be given each meeting for our members to go out and take photos of. Those photos will then be reviewed at the following meeting.

While discussing the items above, we actually went out to Flickr, navigated through portions, and answered some high-level questions about it.

The next portion of the meeting was dedicated to reviewing the photos we took of Courtney at the previous month's meeting (May). While reviewing the photos, we talked about the lighting setups, poses, and what we liked or disliked.

Brett Stoddart was selected as this month's "Photographer of the Month". Even though he was unable to attend the meeting, he did fill out a questionnaire that we went through. (If you are interested in that questionnaire, please contact Carolyn to see if she has a copy available.) [Edit] Brett was recently interviewed by PortalWisconsin.org (a nonprofit web site created by the partners of the Cultural Coalition of Wisconsin to support the state's culture, arts, humanities and history) for his work photographing abandoned buildings... be sure to take some time and check out the article here. Congratulations Brett!

A slideshow of member photos was next.

We finished-up the meeting with Wayne discussing his recent lighting training (Touscany) in Green Bay. He also shared some of the photos he captured from that training.


Next Month - July

• Dave Jackson will be joining us for another outdoor photoshoot. Dave indicated that there is a strong possibility the shoot may go past 9:00pm.


• The current Photography Theme is "Dairy Month using your aperture". This means you should go out and take photos that relate to June being "Dairy Month" and while doing that you should shoot pairs of photos with two different aperture settings (which will illustrate the impact on the depth-of-field). This next part is so hard to explain... It is "recommended" you bring in 6 total photos. Technically that would be 3 unique photos where each of those 3 photos is taken with two different aperture settings. There is a chance we may not be able to review these photos in our July meeting because of the Dave Jackson photoshoot. But, we still encourage you to go out there and try to capture something anyway.

Other Items of Interest...

• The Payne Art Center in Oshkosh is having a photo exhibit June 6 - October 11. We have selected Sunday, August 30th as a possible day for us to go there as a group.


• There was a general reminder about the High Cliff camping trip on October 2nd. If you have any [photography] ideas/games/challenges/etc... that could take place during that event, please let the group know.