June Meeting - Speaker:
Bill Lindsey
The June program will take place on June 18, 2003 and is entitled "Photographic
Artistic Manipulations in Adobe Photoshop and Studio Artist with a Wacom
Pen Tablet" by Bill Lindsay. The program will take place at
the Kovens Conference
Center and will begin at 7:30 pm
 This
program is sponsored by Wacom
and Pro Angle.
Your Customers
Are Searching For You On the Internet - Part One
by Tom Collins
On May 17, 2003 I installed a log system on the PPGF website so that
we can track the traffic to the site. Examination of the logs reveals some
interesting information. The first conclusion that I can come to is that
the PPGF website has become an effective portal, or door, that people are
using to find many of our members.
To use this portal, the visitor usually begins at another portal, such
as a search engine like Google or Yahoo. The log provides evidence that
in many cases, the key words used have in fact been a member's name. The
search engine, having indexed the entire PPGF site, leads the visitor to
the PPGF site, another portal.
The logs clearly indicate that aside from the index page of the PPGF
site, the most visited pages are the membership directory and the members
gallery pages.
Click here to view selected
entries from the PPGF server logs. You may be surprised to find that your
name is there. You may even be surprised to find that your name has been
searched for SEVERAL times in the two week period that the logs have existed
.New member, Darlene Rowe, joined PPGF last month. On Friday, May 30th
a visitor was lead to the PPGF website because of a search using her name
as the keywords.
So what happens if the photographer that is being searched for is no
longer a member of PPGF and their name no longer appears in the membership
directory? In this case, the portal that the PPGF website has become effectively
becomes a dead end.
New Rules for
Digital Prints in Salon Competition
More than 3 years ago, the Board of Directors deliberated the role of
digital images in our Salon Competitions. At the time, very few of our members
were utilizing this new technology. At the time, it was decided that a new
category would be created specifically for heavily manipulated digital images
called the Digital Category. According to the guidelines, any print that
obviously employed enhancements that went beyond what is possible with analog
prints, by rule, MUST be entered in the Digital Category.
But times have changed and digital enhancements are more common place.
The new rules allow digital works of art to also be entered in the Commercial,
Unclassified, and Pictorial Non-Portrait categories.
For clarification, there is no distintion between images captured on
film and images that are captured digitally provided that the digital print
employs simple retouching or borders that are comparable to the capabilitiys
of silver-based prints. Additionally, no distinction is made regarding output
methods. Inkjet prints and dye-sublimation prints are considered on par
with RA-4 prints and may be entered in any category.
Parallels to this situation can be made to the debate within the PP of
A from the 1950's regarding the role of color prints in salon competition.
Today, it is hard to believe that this was ever an issue. | 
