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.

The Pandemic Kidnapped my Beta Readers

 

My middle-grade historical fiction is aimed at girls in the 4^th to 6^th grades and at 3^rd grade girls who read above their grade level, so I use students from a local school as beta readers. I ask the school for volunteers—preferably two girls from each of those four grades—and rely on the principal and the teachers to select the right individuals. I was almost ready to send out the manuscript for my Erie Canal novel when everything stopped. With schools scrambling to change their format from in-person to online, it was clearly the wrong time to ask for their help finding beta readers.

So I put the book on hold waiting for a better time. Originally, I assumed that things would be back to normal by September and I could return to my customary practice.

Wrong.

Schools are still adjusting to new ways of doing things. Although the one I use is holding in-person classes now, the staff is facing different challenges trying to implement the protections that come with that system. I’m just not sure this is the right time to ask for their help identifying the next group of beta readers.

Even when I do, the process may change. In the past, I have dropped off hardcopy manuscripts, questionnaires, and parent permission letters and the school has distributed them for me. That way, the girls didn’t have to use their own printers and supplies to make a copy or to use the less effective method of reading the book on a computer screen. But now they may prefer PDF copies sent by email. That’s actually easier—and cheaper—for me but harder on them. And they would still have to print out the questionnaire and the parent consent letter to complete and return to me.

The principal has told me that the girls enjoy being beta readers, and I’ve gotten that comment from several of them, as well. So they may welcome the oppoutunity. But more importantly, their feedback is extremely valuable and has resulted in significant changes to each of my manuscripts. Beta readers are crucial to the quality of the completed book, and I don’t want to continue without them.

But I’ll have to let the principal tell me when the timing is right.

Keeping Up with the Cousins

I never cared about keeping up with the Joneses. But to give the phrase a different meeting, I am interested in keeping up with the Page cousins. In other words, I want to keep alive the connection that we re-established at funerals when my father and his siblings started dying.

Two summers ago, we all met at my cousin Gail’s house in North Carolina less than two months before Hurricane Florence hit it. Then last fall some of the cousins came to our area and spent a couple of days each with my younger brother and me. My older brother, Donald, wasn’t able to make that one because he was already deep in the throes of Parkinson’s Disease and dementia.

So it seemed fitting to include him one last time and have this year’s mini-reunion at his interment in Michigan. His ashes were buried in the family plot, which includes my parents’ and grandparents’ graves. The Michigan location also made sense because several of my cousins live in the area. Two came from the East Coast, but the other three (also on the East Coast) couldn’t make it. That’s why I call it a mini-reunion.

Roland and I started the trip by meeting one of his Navy buddies and wife at a restaurant in Paw Paw, Michigan. After a good visit with them, we went on to my cousin Ann’s house near Kalamazoo. The storm rolled through while we were there but had calmed down before we left for our hotel.

Everywhere we went there were reminders of the pandemic. Even small children were wearing masks at the rest stops. The hotel required masks in the public areas and had attached a paper seal to the door indicating that the room had been sanitized. The included breakfast had fewer choices than usual, but there was enough of it to fill us up as we ate in our room.

Tuesday was a nice day. The cemetary at Fruitport was a little farther north than Ann’s house, so I don’t know if it had rained there at all, but the ground by the grave was dry. Afterwards, we had a meal at the clubhouse in my cousin Lawrence’s complex, then drove on home.

The photo shows the cousins in our masks just before Donald’s interment service. It may be hard to tell, but even Donald is wearing one over the urn. He would have appreciated the humor.

Although the picture shows only the blood cousins, the gatherings included spouses and several people from the next generation. The Covid-19 precautions created some logistical difficulties, but it was a great visit anyway.

And keeping up with the cousins was just what the doctor prescribed for our mental health.

 

A Covid Fashion Show

I have so many face masks that I needed a place to store them. Roland gave me one of his tie racks, and it works perfectly.

Portraits are not my strong point, and neither, apparently, are selfies. Still, the photos in this post will give you an idea of my current obsession with coordinating my face masks and my outfits. Since I have to wear the masks anyway, why not make it fun? What follows is only a sampling.

My first face mask was homemade by Roland from instructions he got from a church friend. I don’t know what I did with this mask after we started buying them over the Internet.

Next, Roland bought several of these masks for each of us. (It’s really more of a green than a blue, but I couldn’t get the hue right.) I keep one in my car.

When I finally had a chance to get my hair cut, I liked the face mask my hairdresser was wearing, so I asked where it came from. The three-layer masks from www.myshieldmask.com are my favorites for fit and comfort, were relatively inexpensive, and arrived quickly. Only two of them are shown here.

The My Shield masks didn’t come in every color I wanted, so I bought two from someplace else. (I think they've added more since then, however.) Unfortunately, I don’t remember the manufacturer or website. They took a while to arrive, were only two layers, and didn’t fit perfectly, although they are better after I modified the straps and sewed another layer of cloth inside.

Those masks did have an inside pocket for a disposable filter, but the filters that are available, or at least that I can find, were made for commercial masks and don’t fit well in the cloth masks made in response to Covid-19. I added a smaller holder, but I didn’t like the way it worked in these two masks, so I ended up taking it out.

Then there are the masks that I bought from Hyperfavor (www.hyperfavor.com) just for fun. It took a while before they arrived, and they came with two layers and a filter pocket. The holder I added works better in this shape mask, but I still sewed in a third layer of material. These masks fit fairly well although they aren’t perfect.

All of these masks had ear loops. I modified the first masks Roland bought to replace the ear loops with tie strings at the top and bottom, and I did the same with the multi-colored mask shown above. That helped with the comfort and the fit, but it takes longer to get them off and on since they have to be tied each time.

So when I saw a Facebook ad from Pure Mask (www.puremask.com) for a mask with around-the-head elastic bands at the top and bottom, I bought one. It is a little loose and isn’t easily modified, but it has three layers and came quickly.

The final group of masks I bought also have three layers, and I bought them primarily for the nose guard on top and the fact that I could get several colors I didn’t already have. The ear loops were a little loose, but I managed to tighten them up with a needle and thread. I ordered these masks from www.starks.com and they took a long time to arrive, but they complete my wardrobe.

One concern I have with the over-the-ear masks is what to do with them when I’m out somewhere and have to take them off to eat or take communion. If I carry them in my hand, they can get in the way or I might drop them by mistake. If I set them down, I may forget them. So I tied elastic string around the bottom of the ear loops on several masks. It doesn’t help with the fit, but it does allow me to take the mask off while leaving it around my neck.

When the pandemic began, who knew it would start a new fashion trend?

Using Multiple Points of View

I recently finished reading Bloomability by Sharon Creech. In it, one of her characters tells the story of two prisoners sharing a cell that has a small window. One prisoner looks out the window and says, “What a lot of dirt,” while the other looks out the same window and says, “What a lot of sky.”

As the story illustrates, everyone is different. My murder mystery has two point-of-view characters—a female detective and the victim’s daughter. Each needs her own distinctive character and voice. So how do I accomplish that?

The two POV characters have different educational and family backgrounds, and that plays into it. So do their individual interests and personalities and the way they react to stress. But even more important is to give them different speech patterns and dialogue quirks.

For example, the victim’s daughter is a college student whose mother was a lawyer, while the detective and her parents all have high school educations. Since the daughter is better educated and grew up with an eloquent mother, her dialogue and thoughts contain higher-level language. She uses metaphors and a more advanced vocabulary than the detective, who tends to use simple, direct sentences. But their adherence to grammar rules are not what you might expect. Since the daughter is comfortable with her use of language and status in life, she doesn’t feel bound to the traditional grammar rules. Instead, she uses some sentence fragments and often starts sentences with “and” and “but.” The detective, on the other hand, is very conscious of her lower class and wants to appear as educated as possible, so she follows traditional grammar rules unless strong emotion takes over.

The ultimate goal is to create characters so distinct that a reader can open the book in the middle of a chapter and, without any context clues, know whose POV it is in.

But making sure I get there is hard work.

__________

I took the photo in February on one of the Iles du Salut in French Guiana, which was the site of a famous French prison opened in 1852.

Can Covid-19 Stop the Free Exercise of Religion?

We continue to hear about restrictions on religious services even as the country is opening back up or, in some cases, closing down again.

Many churches have chosen to comply with governmental restrictions because they are concerned about the safety of their congregations and also because of Romans 13, which essentially says that Christians should submit to the governing authorities. Obviously, if it is impossible to obey both God and man, then God comes first. But most churches have concluded that there are sufficient ways to worship God that don’t conflict with governmental restrictions.

I said most, not all. Recently, the U.S. Supreme Court was asked to rule in two lawsuits challenging restrictions on the number of people who can attend religeous services during the Covid-19 epidemic.

I’m going to try to make this as simple as possible, but let me start with a little background. The Supreme Court has consistently read the First Amendment’s Freedom of Religion Clause to hold that governments may not place any restrictions on religious beliefs and opinions. But it has also consistently held that the protection for religious PRACTICES is not absolute. In particular, it tends to uphold restrictions on religious behavior (rather than religious beliefs) if the restrictions  (1) involve an area the state is authorized to regulate (e.g., public health and safety), and (2) do not discriminate against religion (i.e., they must also apply to similar activities by secular entities). There is another test that has to do with the strength of the governmental purpose, but that test is complicated and got fuzzier in 1990, so I won’t go into it here.  Finally, the Court’s cases in other contexts make it clear that governments can impose restrictions during an emergency that will not be allowed once the emergency is over.

Both of the recent cases were filed by churches that wanted to hold services that exceeded the attendance numbers set by the state. In the California case, the governor had restricted service attendance to the smaller of 25% of building capacity or 100 individuals. The Nevada case limited attendance to 50 individuals. In each lawsuit, the church asked the Court to issue an injunction prohibiting the state from enforcing the restrictions imposed on churches. And in each instance, the Supreme Court declined.

Does that mean we should be worried about losing our religious freedoms?

No.

First, since injunctions prohibit people from acting, the standards for obtaining them are extremely high. The denial of the injunctions does not tell us anything about how the Court would rule on the same issues when presented in a different type of proceeding.

Second, the Court did not issue a decision explaining its reasoning. The result could be different in cases with facts that are not completely identical.

Third, as noted above, restrictions legally imposed during an emergency can become unconstitutional once the emergency is over.

I am firmly convinced that the First Amendment Freedom of Religion Clause still lives.

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Kathryn Page Camp is a retired attorney and the author of In God We Trust: How the Supreme Court’s First Amendment Decisions Affect Organized Religion, 2^nd ed. (KPPK Publishing, 2015).

The Power of Flexibility

Writers are sometimes classified as either plotters or pantsers. Plotters have every twist and turn planned before they even start writing, while pantsers start with a germ of an idea and then sit down and write by the seat of their pants. Then there are the many writers, like me, who fall somewhere in between.

I start with an outline. I know the beginning and the ending and then pencil in each chapter. That’s sort of like deciding where to go on vacation and then choosing the route to take. Maybe we want to get there quickly, so we stick to the freeways. Or we decide to take the scenic route. Or maybe we want to see specific places that require us to go out of the way.

The outline is what gets me started, just as a trip itinerary does. But although the destination rarely changes, the route may.

As a trip planner, I know every stop I intend to make. Then one site takes less time than we expected so we add something else nearby. Or another site is so fascinating that we spend extra time there and may cut something else out. We may even decide to leave the freeway and wander along the scenic route or vice versa. To be honest, though, that doesn’t happen very often. My trip planning is more rigid than my writing outline.

As I write, new ideas pop into my mind. They often fit within the current structure, but that isn’t always the case. I’ve already added two unplanned chapters to the first draft of my murder mystery because I need them to round out my main POV character. I have also cut—or rather combined—several chapters after I realized that my secondary POV character wouldn’t be present for those events and would have to learn about them second-hand rather than by participating in them. Sometimes telling is necessary, but it takes less space than showing does.

If I didn’t start with an outline, I would soon get lost. But if I stuck to it rigidly, I would miss out on the scenes that pop up along the way.

Flexibility is key.