First of all I must apologize for the lack of a club photo walk in October and November. I did not anticipate some of the difficulties of planning a venue for the ‘dark’ months. I think that a solution is now in place (more about that later) and we are ready to move forward.
Photo Club Christmas Party
Please set aside the evening of Thursday December 16 for the club Christmas Party. I will sending out an evite shortly that will ask for a RSVP. I hope you will be able to attend. Besides enjoying some Christmas cheer, it will be an opportunity to talk about the successes and challenges of the clubs first year and to discuss plans for 2011. Appetizers and ‘dry’ punch will be served. If anyone would like to share their Christmas baking it would be gladly consumed.
Photo Club Structure
At our organizing meeting in the Spring, club members indicated that they did not want to have a rigid structure with President, Secretary, Treasurer etc. I agree with this whole heartedly, however I think it would be good to look at some additional structure or committees. It has been very helpful to have Petra, Josh, Megan, Peta, Erin and others helping organize Photo Walks. What I would like to suggest is that we form a committee to organize photo walks and then take turns. If there were 4 people on the committee then each would organize a photo walk every 3 months. The Squamish CAN group uses a Main Coordinator and Subcommittee Coordinators as their structure and it seems to work well. We should discuss whether that model could work for our group as well.
Indoors for the DARK months
We have been holding our Photo Walks on a Thursday evening starting at 7 pm. Between November and March it is dark out at this time and we need to find an indoor location to meet. Two options have presented themselves:
A. The Education Room at the West Coast Railway Park ($25.00 per use)
B. The Squamish Arts Council Building ($75.00 membership per year)
The cost is roughly the same as we only need to be indoors for 3 or 4 meetings a year. The Railway Park room is perhaps a little better for setting up data projector, chairs etc. But the Arts Council membership would link us with the Arts Community in Squamish and provide many benefits as well. In December I will be sending an email survey to each member to get some feedback on this and other questions, but please give it some thought ahead of the survey.
Regular meeting night.
We have been using Thursday nights, once a month for our photo walk. I suggest we formalize it as the 2nd Thursday of every month so we can all add the date to our calendars ahead of time. Again, this will be on the survey but I would appreciate you giving it some thought ahead of time. Also, if there is a different date or timeframe, let me know and it will be on the survey as well.
Remember, if you are out shooting in this very cold weather, keep your camera batteries in your pocket while transporting the camera. They will last much longer that way.
Doug
