Welcome to the July Landscape Group newsletter.
As I write this, the longest day has just been, Glastonbury has just finished, and Wimbledon is about to start. It must be summer! I hope everyone is enjoying the longer days and hopefully good weather.
While blue skies may not make for the most interesting photographs, there is still a lot to be done over the summer months, and the Landscape Committee has been as busy as ever.
We are working closely with the Digital Imaging Group on a series of joint events, starting with a coastal theme. We have been exploring ways of collaborating on events with a common interest across our two groups. By combining our strengths, we hope to reach even more RPS members and offer events on a larger scale than perhaps we could individually.
There will be Talk Walk Talk (TWT) coastal events across the UK, starting with an introductory talk by Richard Ellis, our former Chair. Richard’s talk will be on 7th September at 7:30pm. More details of this talk and the follow up walks and talks will be available shortly here: https://rps.org/Landscape-Talk-Walk-Talk/. We will be alternating these themed TWT events with the Digital Imaging Group, so we will be hosting the next themed event, currently planned for later this year. We will announce more details in due course. This collaboration with the Digital Imaging Group is a great way of leveraging our two groups’ joint strengths and using the extensive skills and experiences both groups have. Many of us are in both groups and I hope as many as possible can get involved in this ongoing initiative.
Image: Richard Ellis ARPS
Meanwhile, our three special projects are up and running and it’s not too late to sign up for these. Just as a reminder, we have the Shipping Forecast, Postcards from Home and the Zine Project, all available on our website: https://rps.org/groups/landscape/projects/. There are also many professionally led and member led events available on Billetto, with more being added regularly, so please keep checking for new events: https://tinyurl.com/rps-landscape-group-events.
Finally, it wouldn’t be a topical newsletter if I didn’t mention AI (Artificial Intelligence). AI has been all over the news for months now and there has been much discussion about how it will affect photography. The reality is that most of us have been using AI tools for some time now in the likes of Lightroom and Photoshop; content aware fill or automatic selection of a sky, for example. But AI has the power to go much further than helping us with processing; it is now able to generate life-like images without the use of a camera but just based on written prompts or keywords. These developments start to raise all manner of complicated questions relating to definitions and ethics, so it’s great that the RPS has announced a two-day AI conference in October and has also issued a statement on AI: https://rps.org/ai/. I also applaud the Digital Imaging Group for taking the initiative on AI as I believe that AI is at the heart of digital imaging going forward. I’m very interested if any of our members have views on recent AI developments with a particular focus on landscape photography. Please feel free to contact me with your thoughts. I don’t want to duplicate others’ efforts but there may be a particular angle for landscape photography.
In the meantime, I hope everyone enjoys reading this newsletter. We’ll take a short break and return in September. Enjoy the rest of the summer.
Colin
Header image: The Birks Of Aberfeldy © Colin Balfour
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