Tulips

I enjoyed the evening at camera club last night, Our chairman recently was awarded his ARPS (Associate of the Royal Photographic Society) so we asked him to show us his panel of images. He failed his first attempt and on his second attempt he redid his entire panel of 15 images except for one image, so he put up both panels and asked us to vote for which one we thought was the one that passed. It was easy for me to work it out as I had learnt when I did my ARPS what is required in a panel, which is that the panel of 15 images has to be cohesive and the images have to work together, it is not about individual good images but rather the entirety of them assessed as a whole. His submission was of flowers photographed against a black background and converted to mono as part of the Visual Art category. He failed on his first attempt as the panel was not sufficiently cohesive, he had some high key and some low key images, some had lighting and some were natural light, some were photo stacked and some had a shallow depth of field - for the A panel they must all be the same, differences are only allowed in the L panel where you do not require a genre and images can be of different styles and subjects. It is surprisingly difficult to produce 15 images that have the same style, tone, look and feel which is why this is required to be awarded the Associateship. He talked us through the journey of what the judges said and what he improved on his second attempt, and it was very interesting. Then we had a talk by a guest speaker who is also a registered judge who spoke about how we choose from our images for competitions, social media, printing etc.

This morning the plumber came as we have a leak running out of the shower head, so water has been dripping out at a rapid rate since last week. It turns out we need a new cartridge in the mixer unit and apparently it is hard to find the right cartridge, many get discontinued - if that is the case we need to fit an entire new mixer unit controlling the two shower heads. He also had to check a leak in our kitchen ceiling coming from a leaking pipe above it, and on checking a faulty pressure charger unit found another leaking pipe, an important one which brings in the mains cold water. So there are many repairs again and undoubtedly all costly. Our house does require lots of maintenance as I have said before, but it is a large house and I think the scale of things means there is more wear and tear than normal.

I did not sleep well last night as that dripping shower kept me awake (like drip torture) so I am very tired today. However we are out again tonight, we are going to London to see Plaza Suite at the Savoy Theatre. I booked these tickets 6 months ago as it had a very successful run on Broadway and now has come to the West End. It stars Sarah Jessica Parker (Sex and The City) and her real life husband Matthew Broderick playing the main roles in this Neil Simon play and has had very good reviews.