Newsletter 4 went to the printers on 1st September 2001 and was in the post a couple of weeks after that. It is not available on-line, but you can order it by post - see home page.
Editorial
by Footleg
Cave Photography News
Reports on the latest developments in the CPG, and up coming events of interest to cave photographers.
Catching the Judge's Eye
Some suggestions from Footleg on what to look for in your photos when choosing which ones to enter in competitions.
Gallery
Photography by Richard Rushton.
Reader's Letters
Your chance to tell us what you think of the CPG and newsletter.
Making Card Frames For Prints
Richard Rushton describes how you can mount your prints for competitions and framing.
Digital Corner: Scanning Directly From Film
Footleg looks at the options for scanning your pictures directly from your negatives and slides.
Editorial by Footleg
Following hot on the heels of the last issue, this newsletter should reach you a little more punctually than issue 3. Thank you for your patience while we dealt the teething problems of putting together and printing our first full colour issue. Most of the gremlins have hopefully been ironed out of the process now, so without wanting to tempt fate, I expect this issue will go out on schedule.
It's that time of year again when we get the chance to show the results of our photographic exploits to a large cross section of the caving community in the UK. Yes the annual photography competition at the Hidden Earth conference is nearly upon us. We are aiming to send out entry forms and details with this newsletter, and hope that we will see a good number of entries from CPG members in this year's contest. Inside this issue you will find some tips and advice on how to present your work to best effect and hopefully catch the judges eye.
The restrictions on caving due to the foot and mouth outbreaks have thankfully begun to be relaxed now. Despite large areas of the Dales still being closed, I was able to get underground recently, on my first trip since the Spring field meeting. I even got some pictures which I was quite pleased with. The trip down Ibbeth Peril Cave was organised by CPG member Fay Hartley (thanks Fay), an easy trip with plenty to photograph. You can see some of the results from this trip below. I hope some of you have been able to get underground with your cameras again. If not then at least with this issue full of cave photography in your hands, you will be able in indulge in some armchair caving!
Due to the last newsletter only going out a couple of weeks before the deadline for material to reach us for inclusion in this issue, we have struggled a bit to put this one together. So extra thanks go to those members who did manage to get something to us. I hope some of you will be able to put pen to paper and write something for us for issue 5. You have until the end of October to submit material for the Winter issue, so please share your experiences with the rest of the cave photography community. Until then I hope you enjoy what we have put together for you this time.
Cave Photography News - reported by David Gibson
Online Payment of Membership Fees
The Cave Photography Group can now accept your subscription by credit card payment over the Internet. This facility will be of particular benefit to international subscribers (if you have a UK bank account you will find it cheaper to pay by cheque). Unfortunately, the costs of currency exchange and bank transfers mean that we have to add a handling charge of around £2. (It is actually US$ 2.50 since the transactions are with a USA-based bank). However, the charge is probably lower than the fee you would pay for a bankers' draft in UK currency. For more information go to www.caves.org.uk/photography/subs.html
Cave Photography E-mail List
To complement our printed newsletter, we have now set up an electronic 'mailing list' for online chat about cave photography. There are many other caving mailing lists on the Internet - you might be familiar with the Cavers Digest, or with one of the specialised lists for cave surveying, cave biology, cave electronics and so on. For those of you who are unfamiliar with this concept - it is very simple. You email your messages to the list's address, and they are automatically sent out to everyone who has subscribed to the list. They can then reply to you personally, or send a reply to the list, so everybody can read it.
Those of you who have registered to receive information about the Cave Photography Group by email (from our web page at www.caves.org.uk/photography/news.html) will be receiving an email to explain how to sign up to the list. Or you can visit www.caves.org.uk/lists/ to see the latest information.
The Cave Photography list is being set up by the Cave Photography Group, but it is a public list - anyone can post to it, and you do not have to join the CPG to do so. However, we are going to be quite strict with the posting rules for the list - for example all postings must be in plain text (not HTML) and posting of pictures is forbidden. In fact, these are standard rules for mailing lists on the Internet. You will be sent a copy of the posting guidelines when you subscribe to the list.
There are several reasons why we are trying this experiment. Firstly, it will give cave photographers a forum for on-line discussion that is dedicated to cave photography, rather than general caving chat (which is covered in existing forums such as the Cavers Digest and uk.rec.caving). The second reason is that we hope it will help to generate more interest in the Group. Thirdly we hope that the discussions might provide a source of material for the newsletters. It is not our intention to directly reproduce postings from the list, because such discussions seldom transfer well to a 'printed' forum. But if there was an interesting discussion thread, we might encourage one of the authors to write it up 'properly' for our newsletter and maybe submit some photos to go with it. In any case, we would not reproduce anything without seeking the author's permission.
BCRA Photo Salon
The Annual caving conference - Hidden Earth - organised by BCRA, is on 12th-14th October this year (a few weeks later than usual). This year it is in Buxton, Derbyshire. One of the key features of the conference is the Photo Salon, which - as most of you will know - features several competition categories for prints and slides, with prizes. The purpose of the competition is to encourage both new and experienced cave photographers. The photographs will be judged on their technical, artistic and aesthetic qualities, and the BCRA hopes that photographs covering all aspects of caving will be submitted. You should find competition information and an entry form enclosed with this newsletter. If not, then we hope to mail them to you separately. You can obtain information about the conference, and download competition entry forms, from www.hidden-earth.org.uk.
This year the conference features a new competition category, for AV or 'slide-sound' creations. This is a halfway house between the Photo Salon and the Video Salon. Several cave photographers have produced some good work in this medium and it will be interesting to see what they come up with this year. Information on this competition is included on the Video Salon form. The official deadline for AV entries is four weeks before the conference, but if this causes you a problem please contact me as soon as possible.
The Photo Salon always contains an impressive display of prints - the slides are shown at the closing ceremony on Sunday afternoon. One or two beginners sometimes feel a bit daunted by seeing what the 'professionals' can produce. Occasionally the suggestion is made that professionals should be banned, but this would devalue the competition and would be totally unworkable. Not only that, but it is a fallacy to believe that they walk off with all the prizes - they don't! I was pleased and surprised to win something myself last year for the first time. The only sure way not to win is not to enter in the first place.
This point really is important - please do enter the competition, even if all you have are a few 'snapshots'. If they are presentable, and presented well (see Richard's article on mounting your prints) then they can only add value to the displays. Not only that, but there is a category for newcomers. The rules for this have been carefully reworded in recent years, so that you do not have to be a complete newcomer to cave photography. If you are a newcomer to cave diving shots, or a newcomer to black and white photography, this is acceptable - you just have to write a convincing justification on your entry form.
This year we have rewritten the rules for the Cave Life category, to emphasise the biological and scientific aspects of the competition. This may mean that there are less entries than usual in this category, so if you have a possible cave life photo, please do make an effort to enter it. You could stand a good chance of walking away with a prize!
Digital photos always create a stir, as you might have seen from my letter in a recent issue of Caves & Caving. Essentially, the judges are looking at the 'technical, artistic and aesthetic' qualities of your photo, and not whether it is digital or not. Of course, if your digital photo has been poorly printed, over-sharpened, badly compressed or is posterised because of a poor colour depth then it's technical qualities will be low - unless of course you intended it to look like that for 'artistic' reasons.
Can monochrome images really do justice to a cave environment? That someone should raise that question might puzzle you, as it does me - but it has been hinted to me that some photographers do not like black and white for cave shots. That can only be their personal preference, of course, and it is probably true that a well-composed colour slide may look very flat and uninteresting when printed in black and white. But that only serves to show that monochrome photography is a specialised art in itself - and we have seen some very good examples in recent photo salons. It is true that the monochrome print category tends to be unpopular - perhaps because it is so much easier to make colour prints these days - so if you have a good b&w photo you probably stand a fair chance of winning a prize. (But a b&w copy of a colour print is, for the reasons I have given above, not necessarily going to make a good print).
The Photo Salon judges this year are Paul Deakin FRPS, Glenn Jones (known for his AV sequences), and Hugh Penney (former news editor of Caves & Caving). For the Cave Life category the judging will be led by Rhian Hicks. The Photo Salon organiser is Footleg, assisted by Richard Rushton. The Hidden Earth Competitions Secretary is myself, David Gibson.