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Archive of Meetings - 2009

Monday 14th December 2009 - Christmas Quiz

Our Christmas Festive meeting on 14th December 2009 consisted as usual of our annual Christmas Quiz. A splendid selection of donated "goodies" was up for grabs (the most expensive being worth over £200 retail). We had joint highest score winners in the shape of Paul Kuzmin and Mike Bray who both managed to score 14 questions right out of 20. Being Christmas we ensured everyone attending the meeting had a warm mince pies and went away with a prize!

Monday 9th November 2009

Two items on show this evening:
1. Tony Hawes brought along his laptop with Windows 7 64-bit installed and demonstrated and commented on the features in Windows 7 which appealed to him most: Aero snap to pin items to the sides of your desktop. Aero Peek for temporarily minimising (clearing) the icons on the desktop. Libraries for quick access to most used documents and images.
2. He then moved on to a demonstration of Nuance PDF Converter Professional 6 in action with his Epson Perfection V700 Photo scanner doing the scanning. He demonstrated the main features of the program which included how to create, convert, edit and share PDF files. At a fraction of the cost of Adobe Acrobat, PDF Converter 6 was shown to be a worthy and cost effective alternative.

Monday 12th October 2009

This month's meeting consisted of three items:
1. A short practical introduction to some of the new and interesting features of Windows 7 which went on sale 10-days later.
2. We then saw three short introductory videos from Corel showing what's new in Corel's new, cheap and easy-to-use Digital Studio 2010 suite of programs.
3. Laurence Fenn then gave a practical demonstration of Corel Digital Studio 2010 in action.

Monday 14th September 2009

Paul Kuzmin showed his 1-TByte Linux Ripserver NAS (Network storage System), Linn Akurate DS (Digital Streamer) and speakers showing how the whole system worked together.

Monday 8th June 2009 - Improve Your Photo Taking

John Childs presented an interesting evening discussing his photography hobby using Canon cameras and various lenses which he manages to wield without a tripod. All these lenses are zoom lenses apart from a 50 mm traditional fixed lens and he mentioned that fixed lenses are actually more expensive than zoom lenses. He discussed the difference between JPEG for every day use and RAW images for special pictures that can have a lot more processing done in Photoshop or Paint Shop Pro. He also gave a number of useful tips for our summer holidays such as avoiding putting the subject in the middle of the picture and much better to put in one of the outer 1/3 sections. This tends to make the picture look more dynamic. Also if the subject is moving in especially sporting pictures it is a good idea to leave a space in front of the subject to move into which looks much more natural than the subject heading out of frame. In animal shots he generally aimed for the eyes and blurred the background and often crops the picture to focus especially on the animal. He said the blurring the background was very difficult for small cameras to achieve.

Another mistake in photos was not to include a focal point in many landscapes that draws the eye. The timing of pictures was also thought to be essential in landscape pictures with dawn and dusk being the best times. It is also good to give an object of sense of scale in the case of statues and monuments especially. In wildlife scenes it is best to go in as close as possible. He also favoured the use of diagonals such as in a picture of motorbike racing and he showed as some successful panning where the motorbike was in focus and the background was blurred with the motion. He then brought out his spectacular prints which looked incredibly lifelike, my favourite being the otter. I was really impressed with the quality and it is good to see such enthusiasm.

Photos taken at the meeting (resized for display)

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Next September and I plan to demonstrate the Ripserver LINUX network storage device alongside a Windows or LINUX computer with loudspeakers I bought some time ago from Tony. This has enabled me to archive my entire CD collection and I hope to also put a couple of DVD movies and some pictures on just to show what it can do.

Monday 11th May 2009 - AGM and Epson Scanner

Monday 11th May 2009. We held our annual general meeting and Francis Jacques was re-elected treasurer, Paul Kuzmin secretary and Tony Hawes the chairman and editor of ROM magazine. The treasurer said that the subscription to the club would remain at £20 but this would not quite sustain us in through the next year. The membership had fallen quite drastically and as the landlords insisted that the charge for our hire of the hall for the night could not be reduced below the existing £36, it was decided that we would miss the July and February meetings as well as the August meeting so that we met nine times a year. This was proposed by Kevin Kibbey and was seconded by general agreement and a show of hands. With just nine meetings we should be able to cope without raising the subscription. There was also discussion about whether a different venue could be found but this might be more a longer term objective. The University of Surrey was one considered location.

Tony then went on to demonstrate an Epson scanner - not the one that he had hoped to be lent by Epson, but his own Epson Perfection 4990 photo instead. He demonstrated the various masks for transparencies and negatives as well as the very good OCR capability of Abbyy Fine Reader. His laptop was running the first release candidate for Windows 7 and seemed to function perfectly well. We all admired the photo restoration qualities of Epson's software that comes with the scanner, in particular the restoration of badly faded colour transparencies with a pronounced pink cast to near true colours, and all at the click of a mouse, without the intervention of Photoshop or PaintShop Pro was quite amazing.

Monday 20th April 2009 - Crazy Talk 5

Our webmaster (that's me) Laurence Fenn gave a demonstration of Reallusion's Crazy Talk 5. This program can take a photo and turn it into a talking animation. He showed how you mark the defining features on a face and then import a sound file to animate to. You can add background music and move tehe features on the face as well as add effects and objects like glasses, hats or a moustache. As the whole process can take a while to create, he played some files he created earlier, like a gorilla singing Phil Collin's "In The Air Tonight" and also his niece's dog Ozzy singing "Take Me Out" (by Franz Ferdinand). YouTube has quite a few videos created with this software, and you can create video files in a variety of formats, included mobile phone files and flash video files.

You can see examples of what can be done with the software at this Ozzy Sings link or this Tom Speaks link.

Monday 9th March 2009 - Resizing Images/Ricoh R10 Camera

Our meeting on Monday 9th March was in three parts. It started with a most interesting talk by Laurence Fenn on Resizing Images on your PC with the minimum loss of detail. He first listed the various image sources, digital cameras, mobile phones, email scanner or web downloads etc. and then asked the question "why resize". Perhaps your image is too big, it consists of too many KBs to send by email, to add to a document or for a web page or even too small to print out for your requirement. He then went on to explain the resampling methods available and the factors to consider:- blurring, colour depth, resolution etc and showed examples. He then listed the software that can be used to resize images and their various prices. Laurence will be putting an expansion of his talk on the club web site, available in the Articles section.

Continuing on this theme Tony Hawes demonstrated a free program Image Resizer which is part of Microsoft Power Toys for Windows XP. This is available at Power Toys website. By right clicking on an image and selecting "Resize Pictures" the image can be converted to one of four standard sizes, small, medium, large or handheld PC. For example when an image of 400KBs is reduced to "small" it occupies only 69KBs. The image can also be resized to a "custom" size.

The evening finished with John Childs describing the Ricol R10 camera. This is one of the better compact cameras available in the £150 to £200 range. It has a 7.1 optical wide angle zoom and 10 million effective pixels. The sensitivity is given as ISO 1600 but John (who is a very experienced photographer) detected noise starting to show above about ISO 400. It has a 3 inch LCD monitor and has a well constructed body. For the market it is designed for it would be a good choice. That ended a most interesting evening.

Monday 12th January 2009 - Continuum Theory

We had an interesting and rather different talk at our meeting on Monday 12 January, our first meeting in 2009. Miles Osmaston agreed to give an introduction to Continuum Theory. His talk was based on a paper he delivered to a conference on the "Physical Interpretations of Relativity Theory" held at Imperial College, London in September 2008. In his talk, which took the form of a Power Point presentation, after a brief introduction to Continuum Theory, Miles argued that the aether as required by James Clerk Maxwell in has famous equations of the 1870's but avoided by Albert Einstein in his Special Theory of Relativity of 1905 was of fundamental importance. Its neglect under the general relativity banner had been highly detrimental to scientific progress as it had fostered the intangible concepts of Big Bang, Dark Energy and black holes. He explained how the acceptance of the aether can lead to a new understanding of gravitational forces and he then went on to illustrate how this can clarify the formation of galaxies and planetary systems like our own. A very complex and thought provoking talk requiring much concentration. We must thank Miles for the work he has put into these subjects and sharing his conclusions with us. The paper he gave to the conference sponsored by the British Society for Philosophy of Science is on the internet at www.physicsfoundations.org.