NEWS FROM THE COUNCIL

September/October 2020 Cape Camera News from the Council

Our AGM on the 14th of September has come and gone, and we have a new Council for next 12 months. The only noteworthy aspect is that it is the same Council as before, with no changes. This means that all of us on Council enjoy what we are doing and our members have seen no reason to replace us … yet! We have determined that we are going to hold a face to face planning meeting in early November to plan, in an in-depth way, for the 2021 year. New monthly competition subjects have been agreed and you will find them elsewhere in Cape Camera and on our website. We are going to hold an outing to Kirstenbosch on Sunday 1st of November to which we would dearly love all the members who joined during 2020 to please attend, as most of them we have not had the pleasure to meet due to the lockdown regulations. We consider that outings can once more be arranged as long as we adhere to Covid-19 precautions and they are held out in the open. A successful outing to the Cederberg went ahead and the report and photographs you will find in this edition. More outings are being formulated, so look out for notifications in Snapshot emails in the coming months. This is a difficult article for me to write because the results of all the competitions our Club has recently entered are still unknown, but hopefully by time of the publication of Cape Camera on the 31st they will be known. So see the separate results elsewhere of our successes in the three PSSA competitions (for website, magazine, and best images of the year) plus the Cape Western competition for Communication, and finally and most importantly, the local Interclub competition. Let’s hope we win it once more this year. I am very pleased to be able to congratulate some of our members on achieving honours, something we have not encouraged sufficiently in past years. The entry into salons and the achievement of personal honours is held in high regard and I encourage more of you to give it a go. Congratulations to Kim Stevens on being awarded her FPSSA; to Nicol du Toit for being awarded a LPSSA as well as a DPSSA; to Neels Beyers on being awarded an EPSSA (Mille); and lastly to Dave Gordon on his DPSSA. To new members this may all sound like Greek to you, but look up what they all mean on the Photographic Society of South Africa’s website. Council has been grappling with the planning of our year-end function, which has been a dinner for quite a few years, and last year was a cocktail party in the St Stephens Hall. The Hall remains closed to us and we doubt they will allow us to use it for any meetings this year. With social distancing and limitations for restaurants, what do we do? Our solution is to hold a cocktail party with substantial eats at my home in Constantia, where I have a large garden and outside areas suitable for the occasion to allow for social distancing. This is planned for Friday early evening the 4thof December. We are planning towards making that a reality and ask that you reserve the date in your diaries. As usual you will have to make a small monetary contribution towards the costs but you will be heavily subsidized by the Society. This is the function where we showcase the entries of our annual competition and make awards to members. By the time you read this the entries for our annual competition will have closed so it is too late to encourage you to enter, but all I can do is to wish you luck. A team of outside experts has been asked to judge for us. October’s Education and Development talk by James Kerwin on Abandoned Architecture went extremely well with forty attendees on Zoom. I was pleased to see that twelve were from other clubs in our area, sharing in our good fortune of being able to pay presenters from all over the world. No doubt many more of our own members will look at the recording of the presentation.

Richard Goldschmidt President

Invitation to the CTPS Annual Awards Evening 4th December 2020, from 6 pm – 8 pm

Due to the Covid restrictions that require social distancing and gatherings of no more than 50 people, this event will be in the form of a Cocktail Party in Constantia. It will take place out in the open and in the beautiful gardens of our President, Richard Goldschmidt. He has generously offered his residence to provide us with a safe place to finally meet up again and to celebrate the achievements of our club and its members during these strange and challenging times. Tickets to the event will be R100 per person, and R250 for non-members. Council has agreed to contribute an addition R200 per person towards the catering bill, which will include plenty of finger food and drinks. Please book your place early for this very special evening by sending an e-mail to richard@goldschmidt.co.za.