Photo club: Show-and-tell for shutterbugs

Island Photography Group members share laughs, critiques over coffee

Jim McGaw
Posted 5/4/16

MIDDLETOWN — Dr. Bill Condon stood up, slowly removed a matted, color print from a binder, and passed it around.

Then he sat down — and waited to be judged for the first time.

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Photo club: Show-and-tell for shutterbugs

Island Photography Group members share laughs, critiques over coffee

Posted

MIDDLETOWN — Dr. Bill Condon stood up, slowly removed a matted, color print from a binder, and passed it around.

Then he sat down — and waited to be judged for the first time.

Dr. Condon, co-founder of the Sakonnet Veterinary Hospital in Tiverton, was undergoing his first “review” as a member of the Island Photography Group. If he was nervous, he needn’t have been, as members generally praised his image of a purple flower taken during the annual orchid show at Marie Selby Botanical Gardens in Sarasota, Fla.

“I like the crop,” said longtime club member Sylvia Hampton, while Dr. Condon explained the photo was originally a vertical before he turned it into a horizontal. 

He acknowledged, however, that veteran club member Jack Renner of Portsmouth — a stickler for sharpness — might have a problem with the photo’s relatively soft focus. 

“I used a 200-millimeter lens on this and it’s handheld. It’s not tack-sharp, so Jack won’t like it,” Dr. Condon joked. (Mr. Renner, for his part, kept any criticism about image sharpness to himself.)

Ms. Hampton herself was under review recently during breakfast at the Atlantic Grille in Middletown. (The group rotates to different spots every week.) 

She passed around one print of a boy wearing a yellow shirt who was standing by the water. Ms. Hampton used a scanner on an old color print and added “color smoothing,” which gave the image a posterized effect.

This time Mr. Renner, sitting about 12 feet away, spoke up. “I like it better at this distance than I did up close,” he said.

The group, made up of mostly older residents from Aquidneck Island and beyond — some retired, some who decided to get serious about the craft later in life — meets weekly over breakfast to talk about photograph and to just shoot the breeze. Members also keep in touch through a Google Group page.

The group also hangs its works, which can be found in several different locations both on and off the island (see related story).

An offshoot of the Newport Photo Guild, the club is full of shutterbugs who love to talk about composition and framing, the proper paper for a certain print, and the correct meaning and pronunciation of the term “bokeh.” (If we have it right, that’s when a photographer deliberately produces blur in an image so that more emphasis is placed on a different part of the frame.)

‘Completely disorganized’

If you haven’t heard of the group, that’s no surprise. It’s not even currently open for membership, as there’s only so much room for breakfast accommodations. There are about 22 or so members now, along with a small waiting list.

“The group is completely disorganized — no list of members and no dues,” said Ray Drueke of Little Compton, who informally heads up the group.

The 72-year-old was in the high-tech software business before retiring. Other than family snapshots — “I got my Photography Merit Badge in ’56” — he didn’t really dive into photography until six or seven years ago.

“I had been doing a little bit of stuff. My domestic partner is a singer and I had been doing some photography of her,” said Mr. Drueke. “I ended up meeting Jack and Barbara and they said, ‘You should join the Newport Photo Guild,’ and then this group.”

That would be Mr. Renner and his wife Barbara, two of the longest-serving club members. Ms. Renner’s one of the top piano technicians in the country — a tuner to the stars, so to speak. Mr. Renner, former co-owner and chief recording engineer of Telarc Records, has won 11 Grammy Awards and has been nominated for nine more.

Constructive critiques

Mr. Drueke said what he loves most about the club is watching other people grow as photographers.

“Keeping the concepts alive and helping other people is important,” he said. “We’ve done a few teaching seminars and I’ve heard good, constructive reviews of my own work. And I like the social aspects, obviously.”

The critiques are “pretty constructive,” he said. “They’re not really brutal, which is the nice part. Sometimes you might get a question like, ‘Why did you take that picture?’”

Frank Leith of Portsmouth, 80, said he gets plenty of good ideas from the reviews.

“It’s really great to hear other people’s opinions on how you could change it — what’s good, what’s bad. If you have a specific question, there’s probably somebody in the group who’s done it,” said Mr. Leith, who was in the semiconductor manufacturing business for more than three decades before retiring. “It’s a great learning experience and people are really willing to share experiences, thoughts, equipment, techniques, the whole thing.”

His companion, Carole Kenny, a retired traffic manager at WJAR, agreed. “I’m also a quilter and show-and-tell is very important in one’s life,” said Ms. Kenny, 79. “Sharing and hoping that maybe you can hope somebody else, but making them remember that it’s their picture.”

For Mary Ann Kossak of Portsmouth, nothing beats real live human interaction when it comes to getting feedback on her photos.

“I’ve learned a lot because as you know, you can go and Google everything, but how do you sift through that?” she said. “Here, I get a lot of informal advice — What am I doing wrong? How did that happen?”

She loves the fact that club members have such diverse backgrounds. “We have teachers, people in the military, we have engineers, people who have little kids that are home,” she said.

When the weather’s nice, club members will go out on excursions. “We’ve gone over to Little Compton or a road trip where we stopped at different places like Gray’s (Ice Cream),” Ms. Kossak said. “It’s actually fun to go around with people who actually like to stop and take pictures. A lot of it’s about developing camaraderie.”

Different strokes

Every club member has their own favorite subject on which their cameras gaze. 

For Mr. Leith, it’s landscape and travel photography. “I have a website (www.frankleithphotography.com) where I have 20 to 30 pictures from each of the trips,” he said.

Ms. Kenny loves snapping photos of wild animals. “Nothing can beat a trip to Africa. We’ve taken two trips and we just came back from Tanzania. It’s just so thrilling; you can’t even put it in pictures,” she said.

As for Mr. Drueke, he’s most comfortable in front of a bandstand, focusing his lens on local musicians. 

He’s the staff photographer for the Tri-County Symphonic Band and also shoots the John Allmark Jazz Orchestra some Monday nights at Met. On other Mondays you might find him at Gilda's Stone Rooster in Marion, Mass., snapping pictures of the SouthCoast Jazz Orchestra.

Basically if it moves, I shoot it,” said Mr. Drueke, who estimates he has about 60,000 pictures in his collection. “I’m not interested in still life.” 

Check out their works

If you’d like to check out some images taken by members of the Island Photography Group, there are several places where the club hangs its works:

• Custom House Coffee, 796 Aquidneck Ave., Middletown (This is a continuous exhibit, with photos continuously swapped out and often donated to Anthony House in Portsmouth.)

• Portsmouth Free Public Library, 2658 East Main Road, Portsmouth (next exhibit starts in October)

• Tiverton Town Hall, 343 Highland Road, Tiverton

• Newport Public Library, 300 Spring St., Newport

In addition to the exhibits, the group hosts talks and workshops at the Newport Public Library. 

Island Photography Group Portsmouth Free Public Library Newport Photo Guild

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Meet our staff
Jim McGaw

A lifelong Portsmouth resident, Jim graduated from Portsmouth High School in 1982 and earned a journalism degree from the University of Rhode Island in 1986. He's worked two different stints at East Bay Newspapers, for a total of 18 years with the company so far. When not running all over town bringing you the news from Portsmouth, Jim listens to lots and lots and lots of music, watches obscure silent films from the '20s and usually has three books going at once. He also loves to cook crazy New Orleans dishes for his wife of 25 years, Michelle, and their two sons, Jake and Max.