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The Wonders of Zoom!

Zoom has changed our lives! Well mine anyway!

With the current Cvid situation Zoom has become the collective word for video conferencing, like Hoover is for vacuum cleaners. But whichever app you favour it has become, for many, an important tool for communication during our home confinement. To keep in touch, have meet ups, learn new skills or just sit and watch interesting speakers.

The RPS very quickly responded and have offered extremely interesting insights into the lives and histories of well renowned photographers and are continuing well into the autumn and 2021, with a long list of talks and exciting workshops that we can dip into and many at no additional cost. It’s a great time to be a RPS member, and there is a great offer for membership available too.

Regions and Special Interest Groups are getting onboard too, offering cancelled speakers online as well as seeking new presenters and offering 'Hands On' workshops. Lots of planning and thinking is going on behind the scenes to bring you a new online timetable of events for the next few months.

The South East Centre of the Digital Imaging group, with assistance from the DIG Committee, and collaborating with the Creative Eye Group saw Steve Gosling's presentation The Nature Of Creativity at the end of June. Collaboration is good, sharing innovative ideas, reaching a wider audience, and combining skills is surely the way forward? We had a bumper audience that day!

Again in collaboration with DIG and the Creative Eye group we have invited Nat Coalson, to present, Abstract Photography as Fine Art. Here are full details of the Event, all about Nat and how to book. This will brighten those dark days of January.

Zoom Talk with Nat Coalson

At the South East Centre we only managed to run one event in 2020 for our members and we had to take the decision to cancel the other four events weekends and refund all. Rather than just running talks, this year we had added Face to Face workshops with the Photographer, the day before the talk. We had listened to our members and lots wanted Workshops so we were trying these out. A shame we were not to find out how successful they would be.

So as Lockdown set in, we joined in with the 'BIG DIG' talks, and shared the work for the Steve Gosling talk, when we collaborated with the Creative Eye Group. We have another shared and collaborative event planned for January with Nat Coalson.

We are still wary of doing Zoom events on our own and there are enough out there already so we chose to take another route. But we needed to find out if there was a demand for some workshops, this time online. We compiled some questions covering the type of events we might offer and sent out a survey, asking about the most popular genre we might cover, how much people would be willing to pay and who would attend Face to Face events. The response was very promising with immediate replies and within a week we had received 60 replies. This apparently is a good rate of return. This now gave us firm ideas of what type of workshops to run and which genre to concentrate on for our first offerings.

Now we hope they will sell! With small numbers of attendees I am sure we will sell out quickly, we have already recruited some great photographers, so exciting plans for 2021

With the ever changing Covid rules and the difficulty of finding Restaurants and toilets guaranteed to be open and available, we have decided that the workshops arranged for the start of the year will be totally virtual. As things, hopefully improve and confidence returns we will start to offer small, 5 people plus the Tutor, Face to Face workshops.

I know lots of you will be disappointed to not secure places on the workshops, but rest assured if successful we can repeat them.

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First Presenter of 2021

Nat Coalson is our first Presenter, via Zoom, for 2021, in collaboration, once again with DIG and the Creative Eye Group. His talk will brighten the dark days of January and it is entitled 'Abstract Photography as Fine Art'

Go here to find out more details and register for your invite.