Guidance for putting members photos onto the club web gallery

The Web is increasingly being used by Camera Clubs as a means of showing the kind of work that their members produce. It is like an Exhibition.

In the age of digital photography, people interested in joining a Camera Club often look first at the Club website, and the Gallery is intended to promote interest. It is also a means of encouraging our members, by enabling them to show off their work. Because the Club gallery is intended to “showcase” the work of the Club, we are aiming for a fairly high standard. Members’ images for addition to the Gallery have to be either 1, 2, 3, “highly commended” or “commended” in a Club competition, selected by a selection committee, as is done for inter-club competitions, or a folio of work selected by a member to represent his current standard of work. It is intended that about five member folios will be included in the Gallery at any one time, and the Committee should ensure members are invited to submit their work. The Gallery is in the public domain, adding/removing images on the gallery is carried out under password protection by the gallery editors.

Format and size of images provided by members images must be in JPG files. Preferred pixel size is between 400 and 640 pixels horizontally. This is much smaller than most digital cameras will provide, and you will probably have to re-size the image to suit. It reduces risk of piracy to keep them at a quality just adequate for the web. Transmitting your images to the Gallery editor, and re-sizing if you have an email, this is the preferred method. If you don’t, you will have to provide a CD, or USB memory stick, of image files to the gallery editor. The easiest way to re-size and email images is to find the jpg image files on your computer using Windows Explorer, and on the left-hand Windows panel select “email this file”. A small window will appear, and in this, select “show more options” and make sure the 640x480 size is checked. OK this, and your email “compose” window should open, with the image file automatically re-sized and attached. A similar email re-sizing process can be carried out from within most photo editing software.

Send the email to info@ruthincameraclub.co.uk, which forwards to the Club secretary, who can in turn forward them to the “duty gallery editor”. (NOTE: do not use this automatic re-sizing by email for entries for Competitions, they end up far too small).

The Club has no control over the ability of the public to download images from the Club Gallery and use them for their own purposes, possibly infringing Copyright. The only protection we can provide is to ensure images on the Gallery are low resolution so they will be little use for unauthorised publication. If the image has been offered by the member for web publication, author’s permission for the Club to publish it on the Web will be assumed. Regrettably, in these days of public concern, we will not put images of minors on the web Gallery unless written permission of a parent or guardian is provided, even though our members produce some superb portraits of children. The gallery editor will put an album cover image at the start of each album, or elsewhere in the web browsing route to the gallery, indicating that all the images are copyright. No other action will be taken by the Club to protect copyright. If you are expert enough to believe you need greater copyright protection, you should learn how to do this yourself using Photoshop!

Title of Image

You should provide the title for each image, within the digital File Name. The gallery editor will have to type this into the title field of the image in the gallery. Remember when choosing a title, it should be meaningful to someone who does not live in Ruthin or even in Britain, “Cat at the Bakery” (sorry Les), would not mean a lot to someone who did not know that Cat was a model called Catherine and the Bakery is a photo studio near Wrexham – they would look for the loose mouse somewhere, but “Enjoying the Sun” (same photo) says what the photographer had in mind. Or perhaps he didn’t!