Ideas for a Photography Club

I'm trying to start a photography club at my high school. We had a club last

year, although participation was not particularly high. This year, it is my

hope to maintain interest by offering more interesting programs and activities.

I was wondering if anyone had any ideas for projects, programs, etc.

 

The experience level in the group is, for the most part, casual/beginner. Any

activities would have to be enjoyable for someone shooting in AUTO with a P&S

camera.

Try to contact a local Photo shop and ask them to donate a prize and use that to promote your club. Each week that a member comes they can submit one photo into the contest then after a set amount of weeks have the manager of the photo shop select the winning photo. You may even want to say if you bring a new member who continues membership in the club you can submit a second photo into the contest for that week. Each week have the group discuss and critique the submitted photos.

We tried the mini contest/exhibition thing. That was popular at first, but then lost popularity. Do you think that a photo assignment might be more engaging? Unfortunately we do not have any camera stores nearby (isn't that an atrocity?). The nearest camera store is a Ritz camera about 50 miles from here :(

Field trips and visiting speakers are good draws. If having a periodic contest, assuming the numbers are not too high, a quick critique on each image helps keep people coming back.

Christopher- the best way to maintain a club is a message board where you can post your pix and discuss them with each other- then the club is going on all the time..

 

On a number of the other boards I visit I posted this simple way to post photos into the thread- with the photos hosted on tim=npic (like MySpace) you want everyone to re-size their photos before the post them- here is what I post as a "sticky" to the top of the boards.

 

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RE-sizing photos & posting them on the forums

 

The first thing you need to do is to make sure the photos you want to post on the forums aren't too big to post. If you don't have any kind of photo editing program - one of the easiest methods is to use this webpage.

 

http://www.lan-lord.net/photo_resize.aspx

 

Important! - Remember to save the new smaller file as a new, different named file or you will corrupt your larger original file.

 

Photos posted on forums normally should not be wider or longer than 800 pixels. It is better if they are around 640 to 700 pixels wide for horizontal and no longer than 600 if they are vertical. That way the whole image will show up on the monitor without having to scroll. If you use the website I have posted above the ?default? is 640 pixels. But you can set it for ?custom? sizes as well.

 

Once you have re-sized your photo and saved to your desktop you need to ?upload? your photo to a website that will ?host? a photo on their server and allow you to link to the URL address of that photo. The website I normally use to host my photos, that I post on forums/message boards is Tinypic.

 

http://tinypic.com/

 

Go to Tinypic and upload the new re-sized photo file. Once the photo has been uploaded you will see the new URL address for the photo posted in four different ways. The one you need to use for the image to post in your message is the one where you see the URL address surrounded by "image" (IMG)(/IMG) tags. Highlight, then copy & paste that line onto it's own line in the body of your post and your image will appear in the body of your post. Remember to use the ?Preview Post? to view your post before you actually ?Post Message? it to the forum to make sure everything looks OK.

 

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The advantage of this method is the host server doesn't loose band-width/space and it makes the board run faster.

 

See if your high school will allow you a webpage on the school's server to host the club message board on- that way everyone in school can read it and you will get a lot more participation.

I'm going to be starting a photography club for women at my church soon. I have all kinds of ideas, but at our first meeting I'll hand out a survey to see what people want out of it to determine what we'll actually end up doing. You might want to do something similar if you haven't already.

 

My ideas:

 

Photo scavenger hunt

Having a pro come talk to us

Outings to interesting places to take pictures

Photo assignments/themes

Camera show and tell

Photo show and tell

Basic lessons on technical stuff (I think a lot of the women interested all have nice digital cameras and no idea how to work them)

Internet websites/resources (Flickr, shutterfly, photo.net, blogs, etc)

Those are some good ideas. I too was thinking about teaching people how to use the other 99% of their camera.

My post lost it's formatting. Here it's easier to read:

 

Photo scavenger hunt

 

Having a pro come talk to us

 

Outings to interesting places to take pictures

 

 

Photo assignments/themes

 

Camera show and tell

 

Photo show and tell

 

Basic lessons on technical stuff (I think a lot of the women interested all have nice digital cameras and no idea how to work them)

 

 

Internet websites/resources (Flickr, shutterfly, photo.net, blogs, etc)

 

I know I had more ideas but I can't think of them right now.

Just to add to Susan's and others' suggestions, regular meetings of the club (weekly or monthly) to socialize and create a sense of community and fraternity are also very good. During these regular meetings themes such as suggested by Susan can take place (guest speakers, photo show, discussions etc). You can also have sessions where one or several members show their work for constructive criticism by other members. Regular exhibition of club member photos in public places, in the school hall for instance, is a great way to boost interest from the general school community, provide motivation for the members, and entice new members to join. Depending on your budget, setting up computer rooms where members have access to Photoshop (or other software) to work on their photos may also serve as a good incentive to have people join (dont forget to install proper virus protection). If some of your members are interested in film photography you may want to consider setting up a simple dark room for B&W development and enlargement. The possibilities are only limited by your imagination (and your budget...). Good luck in your endeavour

RESIZING - THE easiest way to do this is using a free tool from Microsoft called "Image Resizer". It is one of the Microsoft PowerToys, and you can download it from here...

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/downloads/powertoys/xppowertoys.mspx

 

It's a half meg download - so very small. To use it all you need to do is right-click the image file that you want to resize, select "resize" and then choose the size you want it - there are preset sizes and also a custom resizing field where, for example, you can resize to fit a width of 511 pixels or less to suit in-line display on this forum. There is no need to rename the image as it automatically creates a new name, unless you request otherwise, to save under (it's the original name plus something like "(large)" or "(small)" or "(custom)" depending on the size you have selected). This is far far easier than poncing around in a seperate application entering different sizing options.

 

Pete

For what it is worth. 4-H has a large resource book that anyone can use for ideas with photography clubs. It is headed at kids between 9 and 18 but could easily be adapted to any group. I teach from this curriculum and love it. It is also very adaptable from the large city to smaller rural areas. It should be available from your county extension agent. If you need help locating them let me know.

Millis- not everyone can use the MS Image Resizer in XP Power Toys (only works with WinXP)- not everyone is running XP (I still run W2k)

 

The other free re-sizing tool is Picsa from Google

 

Although nothing is as easy as this simple site

 

http://www.lan-lord.net/photo_resize.aspx

Jack - fair comment, I should have specified XP and not assumed that most people would be using XP anyway.

I personally don't like using tools that you have to access on-line. I find it much easier when it's just there with a "right-click".

 

BTW, the last time anyone called me "Millis" since leaving school in 1983 was about 15 years ago and he ended up getting a kick in the bollocks for his rudeness :)

 

Pete

See if your state camera club organization would "adopt" you:

 

http://www.neccc.org/clubs.htm#Massachusetts

 

NECCC = The New England Camera Club Council

In the olde days, one of the attractions of the local camera club (and perhaps why the members attended regularly) was that they often hired nude models to pose for them. Nudge, nudge, wink, wink....LOL

Millis- I address just about everbody by there last name- it comes from being an infantry sergeant in Vietnam<br>

<img src=http://i1.tinypic.com/n2j33m.jpg>

I don't think the school would allow us to bring in nude models, unfortunately.

We have a photo club (well-it's been on hold since summer-too busy). We just meet once a month and everyone shoots something from a theme. To start we had everyone in the club put an idea for a project into a cup and then we pull one out for the next meeting- that way everyone gets a chance to pick the topic. Then we meet we pin up all of the photos, critique them, and drink cosmos from plastic cups :)