| Important Sweetwater Camera Club News |
| By Richard Nichols |
Hello, Sweetwater Camera Club members, 01. CAC GALA this Saturday Night: I would like to remind everyone that this Saturday Evening is the annual GALA for the Cultural Arts Council here in Douglasville. It is a bit of a dress up affair and costs $65 per person or $130 per couple. The Cultural Arts Council has never needed your help more than now, given the setbacks created by the country’s economic situation resulting in the withdrawal of support for the arts. As a satellite group of the CAC, we are a very active part of this great arts organization whose function in this community is to promote the enjoyment of photography, fine art, writers, musicians and other performing artists. If you haven’t been to the CAC GALA before, you will enjoy it immensely. It is a very classy event with elegant overtones . . . the food is outstanding and the Douglasville Downtown Conference Center comes alive with all the local patrons of the arts. Norma and I went to the past 2 GALAs and have found them to be good for business and a great way of finding out who’s who in our arts community. (Click the picture to the right to enlarge.). For reservations call 770-949-2787 or visit the CAC website at http://www.artsdouglas.org .02. SCC Officers and Chairpeople for 2012: we would like to announce the officers and committee chair positions for the upcoming 2012 Sweetwater Camera Club, as voted into being at the November 10th meeting: President: Richard Nichols Vice President: Rob Hainer with program committee assistance from Erik Peterson Secretary: Jeannie McKnight Assistant Secretary: Carrie Layhue Treasurer: Kent Owings Contest Committee Chairpersons: Erik and Jan Peterson, with meeting assistance from Rob Hainer Fieldtrip Committee Chairman: David Stephens Publicity Committee Chairperson: Norma Nichols Welcoming (Social) Committee Chairperson: Diane Yancey If you would like to serve on any of these committees, I’m sure that these chairpeople can use some help off and on throughout the year. We wish to thank all of you who have stepped up to help! Please know that your time and talents are greatly appreciated. We need for each person in a new position to get together independently with the officer or chairperson from 2011 to compare notes and establish strategic plans. This needs to happen as soon as possible, but especially before Christmas, 2011 to ensure a smooth transition into 2012. We would like to have an officers & chairpersons’ meeting sometime shortly after our December 8th meeting. That meeting and venue will be announced on or before December 8th. 03. New Meeting Space at Hunter Park Community Center: the Sweetwater Camera Club has voted to approve moving our meetings, including our upcoming Christmas Party on December 8th to the new Hunter Park Community Center. Our party and future meetings will be held in Room 208 of the center. This is a very fortunate move. It should enhance the quality of our meetings and provide a fun place to meet and celebrate our photo hobbies each month. We would like to thank SCC Member John Fuller who helped us to secure the St. Julian’s Episcopal Church meeting space several years ago. John has served as a good liaison for us. He also is the guy who made the motion for us to move to Hunter Park, a move that will help us far into the future.  As with any meeting space, there will be issues. The City of Douglasville welcomes us and will work with us to ensure that as we grow, we have what we need in terms of a great meeting space. (Click the picture to the right to see an enlarged map).04. Annual Christmas Party: If you would like to help with the Annual Christmas Party, which will take place December 8th at Hunter Park, please get in touch with Diane Yancey who is chairperson of our Welcoming/Social Committee. You can reach Diane either through email at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it or by phone at 770-942-6972. I’m sure she could use some help in shopping for food and general organization of the party. 05. December Photo Contest is “The Automobile”: Bear in mind that we will not have a speaker at the December meeting, but we will have our “The Automobile” and Field Trip Contests. The contest definition for December is “A picture of a car or truck on the road or on the track.” Usually in December we establish the winners by having everyone vote to determine winning images. This may or may not be the case this year, and will be determined by our Contest Committee. 06. Contest Fee Adjustments: There was recent discussion concerning charging a dollar for each contest entry per month, rather than charging a dollar per category. This decision and others like it will be taken up during the upcoming yet-to-be-announced meeting of the officers and chairpersons in advance of the new year. We are trying to keep the membership fees within reason as we move to a more expensive meeting place. Any additional fees charged through contests will help provide a greater financial cushion for the SCC as well as opening up future opportunities. 07. The Digital Image Group: DIG will no longer meet until further notice. We will be adding more images to the DIG website and catching up with many of the past videos that have never been posted. At some point in the future we may continue the meetings provided there is enough demand for this service. We will work towards a better game plan, meeting model, and work to find a meeting space that is affordable and comfortable for DIG members. 08. Payment of 2012 Dues: We would like for everyone to pay their SCC dues for 2012 on or before January 31st 2012. These membership rules are changing to help the administration of all portions of the club in the future. A number of people asked that we establish a new policy that all returning members pay their dues by December 31st for the following year. This policy would include a penalty clause which would require more money after the deadline in order to motivate people to get their fees in on time. We have always paid the yearly meeting space rent in advance, at the beginning of January. In addition, this will help the Contest Committee to determine who is a bonafide member. In prior years, the extended deadline of March 31st has allowed people to enter 3 monthly contests during the new year for which they did not pay membership fees, thereby undermining the validity of contest points. It would be possible with the old system for someone to not achieve “Photographer of the Year” simply by losing to people who are no longer members who won in January, February and March, then dropped out of the club. We need to change this to ensure fairness and get our administrative housekeeping done as soon as the new year starts. 09. Lowering of Website Costs: One idea that Norma and I have come up with concerns the website fees that the SCC pays each year. Up until now the SCC has been paying over $200 per year for the website, Secure Site License required for taking money over the web, and a static I.P. address. In order to diminish that fee to $25 or less, we (Art on Disk Corporation) would like to donate the web space required. Times have changed and we believe that we may no longer need a Secure Site License or a static I.P. address because web hosting technology has moved forward. Those things are now a requirement for independent shopping carts, but since we are using a direct link to PayPal, we may be able to get around these extra fees. We will be experimenting over the next month to see if we can move the SweetwaterCameraClub.org site to our servers (they are still run by Bluehost.com, not by us, but the web space is paid for by Art on Disk). 10. New Digital Image Contest Entries using Flickr: We discussed having a digital image portion to the SCC monthly contests, with images to be uploaded to a pro Flickr account set up by VP-elect Rob Hainer. More information will be coming your way as we solidify our procedures at upcoming leadership meetings. This will be up to Erik and Jan Peterson with help from Rob as to how this might be administered. It will require some new rules and procedures as well as a tutorial instructing members in how to participate, if this idea is adopted. 11. SCC Constitution and Bylaws to be updated: 2012 Assistant Secretary-to-be Carrie Layhue has volunteered to help rewrite the SCC Constitution and Bylaws to bring them up-to-date and to eliminate a few outworn ideas while adding more procedural information. This will take a while, and input will be asked from members as it takes shape so we can move forward with procedures, rules and a strong mission that makes good sense. Carrie was responsible for helping write or update the employee manual where she works, so we are looking forward to some great help in this regard. 12. Upload Your Winning Contest Entries as soon as possible after each meeting: We would like to remind our winners at the November 10th meeting to please send in your winning entries so we can create the next Chapel Hill News & Views page. Stella Spyrou has mentioned several times that it would be nice if we had the winners posted as full size photos on the SCC website. In order to do that, we need a volunteer who can help us by resizing the images and adding copyright notices to them, then uploading the images to our gallery. This may also be something that the pro Flickr account can help us with. However, any website additions would require embedding the Flickr gallery monthly entries into the SCC website, so it will prove to be a more complex task, to be undertaken by someone who has some web experience. These procedures will also require that the images be posted after they are all collected from the winners. We often don’t have access to all the images until after the first of the next month after the contest.  13. Photo Methods—Creating Star Trails: Rob Hainer would like to share his knowledge of how he achieved his award winning image “Pointing North” containing star trails. He won 2nd Place in the Color Photo Division on November 10th. Attached you will find a PDF file that he sent in concerning these procedures. Click picture to enlarge.  14. Field Trip on December 2nd: 2012 Field Trip Chairman David Stephens would like to announce a December 2nd Field Trip to Downtown Douglasville to O’Neal Plaza for the 2nd Annual Christmas Parade, Concert and Tree Lighting. See attached blurb from Mainstreet Douglasville. For full details, please visit http://www.ci.douglasville.ga.us/CivicAlerts.aspx?AID=150 (Click the Picture to the right to enlarge discription).15. Possible Field Trip on December 14th: Wrestling at Alexander High School: SCC Member Carl Pearson is working to put together a tentative field trip to Alexander High School on Wednesday evening, December 14th, a week night-- to shoot sports pictures of wrestling teams. Carl is a wrestling coach at Alexander. I believe that the fee for attending is $5.00 . . . The venue will be OK’d in advance to be photographer friendly. 16. January 2012 Speaker will be John Mariana: To the left you will find John Mariana’s press release concerning his upcoming appearance at the Cobb Photographic Society in November. John has agreed to come give us his lecture at our January 12th SCC Meeting. John’s topic will be “Expressive Black and White Photography.” Norma and I have enjoyed meeting John through our dealings with the North Georgia Camera Club Council. He is a major photographic educator and workshop instructor, so don’t miss this meeting!Thanks for reading the SCC news! If I have left anything out or you have comments, suggestions or corrections, please let me know. Richard |