The PVCC Club

Indianapolis has a very active photography club that meets regularly, the Photo Venture Camera Club. It’s has 100+ members that meet every Thursday at the Indianapolis Arts Center in Broad Ripple. Anywhere between 25-50 of the members come out to the weekly meetings.

One highlight of the PVCC club meetings is a monthly theme-based contest. A nice component of these meetings is the club brings in professional photographer to judge the entries and provide their insight, critiques, and select the winners (1st through 3rd both on and off topic). What I like about this monthly event is the pros are good at telling what they like and what in their opinion how an image can be improved. I personally like constructive critique.

This month the topic was Zen Landscaping and the featured judge was local professional photographer, Andy Chen. Andy is a feature in the photo scene in Indianapolis and has a studio in the Stutz Arts Building. His site is http://www.whatandysaw.com/. Andy describes himself as a “fine arts” photographer.

Andy shared some of his professional advice on photography I’ll highlight:

• In fine arts photography world everything is “project” based versus random photos,
• A project is something you are interested in (“curious about”), a theme, that you can go back over and over again over time,
• In a project, or when presenting a project, the sequence on how photographs are presented is important,
• Your photos need to be of interest others as well as yourself (common sense),
• Your image needs to be something “worth paying attention to”, something that “draws you into the photo”,
• Create a sense of expectation,
• Within your photo does everything work together?
• With your image’s composition, everything must fit into the story, or the “intent” of your image,
• With post processing be careful about your cropping (crop out anything that doesn’t fit the “intent” of your image, and don’t over sharpen,
• If you are going to present your photo in a printed format, make sure your print is of high quality. Your mounting or framing must work with the image. It’s a total package, 

Overall, a good meeting with some good images.