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Welcome to the start of another new camera club year! This is a long post but has a lot of important information so please take the time to read through it. If you have any questions contact Michelle.
First meeting
Our first meeting will be on September 13th at 5:30pm at Myrick Park. We will be having a potluck picnic followed by a photo shoot in the marsh. See the club calendar for details. This meeting is open to the public so feel free to bring family and also tell anyone you know that is interested in photography.
Membership dues
As of September 1st, everyone that has not yet paid (with the exception of a few people on the leadership team that need access) has been set to "former member". Please get your dues in to Danette so she can update you to "member". You will need to pay before entering competition. You can find Danette's address on the join/renew page or you can pay at the meeting.
Zoom
We have decided to end the Zoom option for meetings unless we are unable to meet in person. Getting it set up was just taking too much time at the start of each meeting, especially competition result meetings that already run long. I will try to be better about getting the recaps and resources online quickly so those who were not able to attend in person can catch up.
Profiles
We still have a lot of members that have not filled out their profiles. While this is optional, it is very helpful for getting to know other members and finding folks with similar interests. To make changes, click "Profile" in the top menu and then "Edit". You can set your profile to only show to members if you are not comfortable having that information available to anyone who visits the site.
Mentors
Currently on the mentor list we have: Jerry Bonsack, Curt Murray, Austin Miller, Dan McKenzie, Brian Narveson, Peder Shoenfeld, Mary Ann Roesler, and Cyndy Thorn. If any of you are no longer interested in mentoring, please either let me know or edit your profile and uncheck "Active mentor". If anyone else is interested in mentoring, just fill out the "Mentor profile" tab on your profile. You don't need to be an expert to mentor; just be willing to answer questions in the areas you indicate you can help.
Website updates
I have been busy working on the website this last week and have a number of changes to share.
Calendar: The club calendar has been updated with all the known events for the year. Note that all the workshop dates are set to the 15th of the month. This is a temporary date just to get them on the calendar and will likely change once the workshop presenter decides when and where it will be held. I've also combined several categories to make the filter more reasonable and changed how the location is displayed on event pages.
Competitions:
- The competition schedule is up and competitions are open.
- Competition entries now have two new checkboxes.
- The first one is to give permission for the image to be used as decoration on the website (and the Ground Glass when it returns). This means using it in places like the event pages or news pages. Basically anywhere outside of the competition galleries. Because most people I've talked to seem ok with this usage, this is checked by default. You can uncheck it if you don't want the image used in this way.
- The second checkbox is to allow us to use it on social media. This is so we can, for example, show off the latest winners on our Facebook page. Because I expect we will have people not wanting their image posted elsewhere, it is not checked by default and you'll need to check it each time if you are ok with it.
- I have also put up the competition gallery for last year's EOY competition. At the moment, it's set up to only see the last year and not prior years (unless you hack the URL) but I have fixing that on my "todo" list.
Code updates: This took by far the longest time and is probably the least interesting to all of you. LOL! The site is now completely up to date on the latest version of Drupal, all contributed modules, and PHP. I have done my best to thoroughly test the site but this was a pretty massive update and there may be bugs I haven't found. If you run into any errors, please let me know what page and what you did right before the error happened so I can get it fixed.
Galleries: The script we were using for image galleries was pretty but had a lot of functional issues, especially on mobile. I had been considering getting rid of it and then found it was completely broken on the new version of Drupal so I replaced it everywhere. The new gallery script shows large thumbnails in a brick-like pattern . You can click on an image to see it larger along with maker and competition information. There is also an option to view them as a slide show once you click an image.
Future updates: I have a long to do list and, after taking a break for most of last year, have gotten some ambition back to work on them. Expect more changes, some big, some small, to be showing up throughout the year.
Ground Glass
The Ground Glass is on hiatus again. As much as I really want us to have a newsletter, it is really hard for me to be the one creating the newsletter. I have limited time and energy to work on camera club stuff and need to focus on the website for a while. If anyone is interested in taking the newsletter over, I can help you get started. Otherwise, I will look at bringing it back again next year.