It's a Zoom World

 

We don’t know how good we have it.

Imagine what it was like to leave home and not know what was happening to friends or family until a rare letter came through. Since I write historical fiction, some of my characters experience this isolation.

When COVID 19 shut everything down, I thought I was cut off from most of my creative groups. I still communicated regularly with my online critique partner, but what about writers’ conferences and meetings of my photography club? I missed the in-person contact, and I still do. But thanks to Zoom and its competitors, face-to-face interaction is not dead.

The Highland Writers Group had been meeting in-person at coffee houses, but it quickly adjusted to the pandemic by adopting a Zoom meeting format where we chat a bit and then read and critique our work. We have since returned to meeting at venues that allow for in-person interaction, but Zoom is still available for those who are worried about COVID or for whom travel to the in-person location is inconvenient.

The Calumet Region Photo Club (CRPC) also adjusted by holding its meeting via Zoom. And somebody from the umbrella group developed a computer program for holding internet competitions. Of course, that only works for digital images, so those clubs that want to have print competitions must do them in person. My club has chosen to stick with digital competitions for now, and that’s fine with me since I rarely entered prints before the pandemic. (Digital images are cheaper and less work.)

CRPC had an in-person picnic in the summer and an in-person Christmas dinner in December, and they were both wonderful. We thought we were going to return to in-person program and mentoring meetings starting tomorrow, but circumstances interfered and we’ll be online for another month.

I really miss attending writers’ conferences, and I was looking forward to attending the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators’ (SCBWI) Midwest conference in April. So I was really disappointed when that got cancelled. But the SCBWI has been offering free online workshops for members, and I’ve taken advantage of some of them. That isn’t a Zoom format, but I do get to see the presenters, and those who watch real-time can use the chat function to ask questions.

In-person meetings are always the best way to foster relationships and to learn from others, and I can’t wait until things return to the old normal. At least, I hope they will do that.

But the pandemic hasn’t eliminated all opportunities to interact with other creative individuals and learn from them.

And I’m grateful.

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The photo at the top of this post shows the Highland Writers Group’s March 13, 2021 Zoom meeting.  

Photography Club Technology

 

I belong to the Calumet Region Photo Club (CRPC), which is a member of the Chicago Area Camera Club Association (CACCA). Covid-19 has been as hard on us as on other groups, but things are getting better. And a lot of that has to do with advances in technology that we didn’t even anticipate 20 years ago.

CRPC hasn’t met in person since March. We used to meet three Tuesdays a month—one for an education program, one for mentoring, and one for competition. Some of the other clubs have been holding Zoom educational programs and inviting us, and I did attend one of those, but we haven’t hosted any ourselves. In June we resumed the mentoring via Zoom meeting. And now we are getting ready to start the competition meetings up again using software developed for that purpose by a member of another CACCA club.

I sat “Zoomed” in on a demonstartion of the software last Tuesday, and I was impressed. Club members upload photos competition photos, review them, and can—until the closing date for entries to that competition—remove and/or replace them. When the competition date comes around, the judges will rate the entries online and the software will do the rest.

The biggest difference is that there will be no more print competition, at least for a while. It will all be done online, which means only DPIs can be entered. But within each of the two classes (advanced photographers and the rest of us), there will be categories for monochrome, color, and a special monthly theme. That’s at the club level.

The best images from the club competition go on to a CACCA competition. CACCA also has additional categories for individual entries in nature, photojournalism, portrait, and creative.

In the past, I’ve submitted some DPIs but never entered the print competition because of the logistics. Since the new system is limited to DPIs, I will probably enter more often.

Winning a competition is always nice, but that’s not my primary reason for entering. It’s more a way to get feedback on how my photos compare with other photos. But the new software sounds like fun.

And I’m excited about using it.

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The picture at the top of this post is a screen shot of a software page for reviewing uploaded photos. This one shows a photo I took of Diamond Head on Oahu.