Tellico Village has a club for just about every interest, appealing to different minds and personalities during retirement life. Add photography to the mix.
Members of the Just For Fun Photography club enjoy constructive criticism at their monthly meetings, and members believe their skills in the art form improve through the critiques from fellow members.
Club leader Jim Jeswald said about two dozen regularly attend the club’s monthly meetings at the Chota Recreation Center. Each month, members are given a topic to photograph and during meetings members share their photographs and opinions on how to make fellow photographers’ art work better. Besides constructive criticism, it’s almost like a viewing gallery every month, club member Gail Eades, who has been with the group since its inception about five years ago.
Last month, the topic was flight.
“We got anywhere from a bird to airplanes,” Eades said. “It allows us to use our imagination and that pretty much is the most fun part of the club.”
Each month the club also includes a photographer’s portfolio, where one club member will bring in a collection of photographs for comrades to judge the three best photos. Those three photographs are then featured at the rec center for a month.
Both Eades and Jeswald said though the club is not a photography workshop it does help members improve their skills.
“Over the years those who have stuck with the club have improved a thousand fold,” Eades said. “I’ll never forget one person told me, ‘Gail, you center every single picture. It would be much more interesting if you would take the subject matter and take it out of the center.’ ... Honestly that’s been the best advice I’ve ever had.”
“Although we are not teaching, (we) have people come in and lecture what does aperture mean, what does shutter speed mean, what is ISO ... even though we don’t do that just being able to experiment and say, ‘What if we take a picture of flight this way? If the image was blurred because the bird was moving too fast what might we be able to do with our cameras to change that in order to get a better picture?’ That’s given everyone the chance to learn their camera and learn some techniques about taking pictures that they may have not known before.”
The club meets at 7 p.m. the second Monday of every month at the recreation center.
Though he enjoys the opportunity to refine his photography skills, Jeswald said he also enjoys seeing others take on a subject matter.
“It gives you an opportunity to think about it and spend the month hopefully refining your skills, and I like the way everyone interprets the subjects,” Jeswald said. “It gives people an opportunity to go out and interpret the way they approached that subject. That to me is the neat part. April was flight, and then 15 people bring in pictures about how they think about flight. You had some people who did the obvious stuff that you would expect like a bird or a hummingbird at a feeder. You had kites, airplanes, people doing gliders, so all kinds of neat stuff. Everyone came at it from a different direction.”
It doesn’t matter if an individual has a $100 point-and-shoot or an expensive top-of-the-line camera, all, including those from surrounding communities, are welcome to join.
“It’s just for fun. We’re not a teaching club or a heavy competition club,” Jeswald said. “We’re just a club that gets together once a month, and we have a monthly topic and members bring in a picture of something that represents that monthly topic. We hang them up and talk about them and ask the member how they took the picture and give us some insight into what they were thinking when they took it, and it gives them constructive criticism or what approach someone might have taken differently to do that same picture.”
Besides monthly meetings, members occasionally go on outings together as a way to hone their photography skills.
“We may take a road trip to a waterfall somewhere or we may all go to a nature preserve or something like that to take pictures,” Jeswald said.
“That way we are taking the same kind of pictures using the same topic. That’s been interesting. It’s the same waterfall but everyone had a different perspective,” Eades said.
“We’ve had an opportunity to go up to The Neighborhood which is where senior citizens that are kind of to a point where they can’t be in a home by themselves are living, and we’ve gone up there and did portraits of them and then brought them back their portraits. That was really neat,” Jeswald added. “That was kind of a fun way to learn how to take a good portrait picture and at the same time be able to help the folks at The Neighborhood.”
