AGM | 13 June 2018

Oddly, for a camera group, we didn’t see many photos this Wednesday. Except for the outgoing Chair’s well-illustrated PowerPoint, which even seemed to include an image of a chocolate teapot!

 

This was a friendly, informal AGM, with plenty of laughs and well-deserved applause for those who had helped run the club during the last year. Thanks to an issue with the main lighting, the platform party were suitably back lit – a nice example of contrejour!

In his Chair’s report, Aodan celebrated our strong growth during the past three years. Now that Photocraft has fifty members, we have been able to afford premium external speakers. We have been impressed by the determination and perseverance that speakers have described in order to get good pictures, as well as a good dose of blagging in some cases! People have also appreciated the members’ evenings, when we have drawn on our own considerable stores of accumulated photographic knowledge and have explored particular niche interests. We have had a stimulating set of events and outings. Photocraft has engaged with a number of external competitions, often with stellar performance on our part! Internal competitions have attracted plenty of fine entries. PDI competitions have benefitted hugely from the new projector and the new streamlined PhotoEntry online submission system. The weekly blogs have continued to give a good flavour of what happens at our meetings – not least, to potential new members. Whilst, behind the scenes, there is a lot of generous volunteering to keep the show on the road.

As Treasurer, Steve reported a healthy bank balance. One of our next purchases is likely to be a new projection screen, to put an end to wavy PDIs.

Mark, as Programme Secretary, presented the findings from the free online survey tool we have been using to evaluate external speakers. Most speakers had been pretty well-received and none had received an overall score of less than 8.29 out of 10. He encouraged all members to complete the surveys in future: on average each survey takes just 2 minutes 28 seconds of your time!

Election of committee members and appointment of other volunteers took place without any painful contests or embarrassing silences. Full details will be in the official Minutes, but the headlines are – Chair: Mark B | Deputy Chair: Martin F | Treasurer: Ann H  |  Membership Secretary: Steve H | Programme Secretary: Graham S. Most of the other positions are as before, except that Jane D has segued across to help organise the tea rota. We wish them all well in 2018-19 in these different roles.

AOB included:

•  The idea of holding an annual exhibition was aired.
•  An amendment was agreed to Monochrome Competition Rule #5, so that it now reads: ‘The term monochrome describes an image produced in varying densities of a single hue. Conventionally that hue would be a neutral grey, with densities from white to black. However, the neutral grey could be replaced by any single hue.’
• We agreed to use the PhotoEntry online submission system for Print as well as PDI competitions.
• As part of our value-adding for members, we welcomed the idea of an Events Newsletter, containing information about local photographic exhibitions, etc – Brian C volunteered to collate the newsletter and send it out to members as a bi-weekly/monthly email
• We were attracted to the idea of introducing more club outings (apart from Wednesday evenings) to do photography together, etc – Brian C volunteered to make some creative proposals.
• It was recognised that we will need to find ways of spreading the load in terms of opening and setting up the hall for our meetings.
• Our GDPR policy will be devised by the end of the summer.
• The summer social will be kindly hosted by Joy S, on 12 August, from 14:30.

As AGMs go, this wasn’t the shortest, but it was very well-focused, extremely productive and lots of fun!