Should I calibrate my monitor?

Last year the club purchased a Spyder calibration system so that images shown on our projector were as accurate as possible. However, if your monitor at home isn't calibrated to the same levels your images could look very different.

Ideally, if you want to ensure that the image you see on your monitor at home looks the same as the image shown on our projector you should calibrate your screen. Left uncalibrated your images will probably look slightly different on our projector, and this may or may not effect how your photograph is judged. For a novice, you probably won't worry about slight differences, but if you've spent hours in Photoshop adjusting the colour balance of your image you'll want it to look as good as possible.

Using the Spyder system you can set up different colour profiles on your computer so that your screen is optimised for viewing images that will be projected in camera club competitions or so that your printed images match what you see on your monitor.

It costs £5 to hire the calibration system from the club and the funds will be used to cover the cost of buying the Spyder hardware and software.

Rules of composition

Last season some of the new members asked about the composition rules to which judges often refer. Here are some of the main ones:

• Don't cut your picture in half horizontally or vertically by having a line going through the centre of the picture. The most common culprit is the horizon – try to have more picture below the horizon than above or vice versa.
• Have a focal point but don't let it be in the centre of the picture. The ideal position is on a “golden third”. Imagine having a noughts and crosses frame over your picture and where the lines cross are the golden thirds.
• Have an odd number of objects in your photo rather than an even number ie. 3 swans rather than 2 or 4, 5 flowers rather than 4 or 6.
• It is good to have a lead in to a picture and ideally it should lead in from left to right as that is the way we read.
• However, remember that rules are made to be broken and some excellent pictures are produces even when breaking these rules.

Do I need Photoshop?

To make your images ready for competition you need image editing software. The most popular programme for photo editing is Adobe Photoshop. Photoshop is available as a full programme (Photoshop CS) or as a stripped down version that will suite most camera club members needs (Photoshop Elements). However, these programmes can get quite expensive. Fortunately there are some other free programmes which can do a similar job such as Picasa from Google, IrfanView and GIMP.

Picasa has a very simple interface and enables you to fix simple problems with your photos, crop your images, and organise your pictures. However it doesn't re-size images so you'll need another piece of software to do that. IrfanView and GIMP are powerful programmes which allow you to edit your images, crop your photos and re-size your images, something which is essential when preparing images for competitions.

One of the downsides of using a free programme is that although the features may be similar, they will work in completely different ways. If you're a novice then Photoshop Elements is probably the most useful piece of software because of the amount of advice available on the programme, however, if you're on a budget and don't mind learning a new bit of software it's worth trying Picasa to edit and IrfanView to re-size your images. If you then want more advanced features give GIMP a go.