Category: Blog

17 Sep 2025 Themes: Still Life, Flash, Storytelling

The themes this month are classic photography ideas – Still Life can be the classic tabletop subjects such as flowers, fruits, and objects or it can be a play on the theme ‘still life’. All participants went classical and shared images that would fit an Edward Weston or Imogen Cunningham workshop. There was a successful use of Reflect photography software to add a reflective effect to a still life whisk.
Sept 7th we had a Harvest Moonrise meetup in San Diego by the Coronado Bridge. Some others in the group preferred the San Diego skyline from Shelter Island.
Gary requested a revisit of the Flash Photography theme and he shared an image taken on film years ago. The rest of us did not have anything in this category although it’s one of my favorites in recent months.
Storytelling is the general idea of using three or more shots of a location to tell a story photographically. Usually starting with a wide ‘establishing’ shot, then a medium shot, and finally a detailed closeup. There were a few sets, one from from Heather – a graffitied levee, and Jim’s Oceanside Museum of Art current “Fabulous Fiber’ exhibition. Jim’s ‘still lifes’ were closeup images of artworks.
Norm, whose been absent from the meetings for awhile, submitted some wonderful still life images. (Thanks, Norm and join us anytime)
Thyrra missed the meeting but submitted some Sept 7th Harvest Full Moon Rising images.
“Still Life” images were my favorites of September. Here’s the images shared:

Barb Donovan

Cathy

Gary

Heather

Norm

Jim

Sharon

Thyrra

20 Aug 2025 Themes: Sports, Summer Vacation, Reflections & Geometric Shapes

This month meeting had a variety of photos shared with many from the July 22nd San Diego Velodrome meetup. This was our 1st time shooting the bicycle racers and many lessons were learned. We hopefully will do it again and have even better success capturing the cyclists. Heather shared wonderful vacation photos of the festival in Oaxaca Mexico. Gary shared a photo of beautiful light on Lake McDonald, West Glacier Park. Plus photos taken on the visiting USCG sailing ship Barque Eagle, and San Diego resident Star of India. Mikky shared more images from his recent trip to Africa. This time it was of his elephant and leopard encounters on safari. Barb Donovan, our newest member, is traveling but I culled several images from her velodrome folder. Cathy has some of the best velodrome images showing the racers in action. Sharon shared some wonderful macro flower shots and an unusual geometric building that defies conventional aesthetics. Jim experimented with long exposure flash photography at the velodrome. Additionally, he made to Balboa Park Aug 9th for a full moon rising behind the California Tower. A popular vantage point for moonrise in San Diego.

Here are the images from this month’s meeting:

Barb Donovan

Cathy

Gary

Heather

Mikky

Sharon

Jim

18 Jun 2025 Themes: Missions, San Diego Fair

This month’s themes were images of the California Missions and the San Diego Fair. We had a meetup June 11th at the SD Fair Photography Exhibition to review accepted photos. After the ribbon award announcements, a few of us wander the Fair in search of some evening and night photos. Here are the images shared at the meeting:

Barbara

Cathy

Gary

Heather

Jim

21 May 2025 Themes: Silhouettes/Backlit, Selective Color, Spring Is In the Air

Our May themes were silhouettes/backlit, selective color, and “Spring is in the Air”. Silhouettes and/or backlit are self-explanatory. Selective color can be a couple of things – photos with one specific dominant color, black&white image with a single color visible, or any artist’s interpretation. “Spring Is In The Air” would be any photos displaying the Spring Season. There were 7 participants in the May meeting. Here are the images shared:

Barbara

Cathy

Gary

Heather

Jim

Sharon

16 Apr 2025: Flowers & Perspective

This month’s Flower theme celebrates Spring season and the beautiful blooms it brings. Many meeting participants shared some colorful photos of flowers. The secondary theme was Perspective: leading lines, layers, and framed-in-frame, standard compositional elements for photography. Here are the images shared this month:

Barbara

Gary

Jim

John

Mikky

Sharon

Organizing Photos

As digital photographers, our photo collections can get out of hand. This page will discuss some ways of organizing your photos so you can back them up and find specific photos later on.
My iPhone, in particular, can have thousands of photos, screenshots, and videos. I have my iPhone photos automatically backup to my Google Drive. Plus iCloud Photos also keeps copies of these photos. These are a great backup for your photos, but if you want to free up space on your phone. You need to download them from iCloud so when you delete them from your phone. You will still have a copy.
From time to time, I tag my Google Drive photos and download them to my home computer. The hundreds of photos I tag are downloaded as a single zip file. When unzipped, they end up in a single directory and their names are non-descript.
So here are some of the ways to organize all these photos:

  • Apple Photos (free) – on MacOS & iOS, the Photos app can be used to organize your massive photo collection. Creating albums is the best way to organize large groups of photos. You can also setup Smart Albums, with criteria like “portraits” or “pets”, and Apple AI will auto-organize your photos.
    Apple laptops & iPhone are great at keeping all your photos safe. By backing all photos on your Mac, iPhone & iPad to iCloud automatically. This can be turned off or switched to Google Drive($). But unless you upgrade($) to more Apple storage, your large photo collection can max out the space. You can stop uploading to iCloud by setting your device to “not copy to the Photos library”. This will keep your photos from automatically going to iCloud.
    See next item if you want to move your Photos library from your main drive to an external drive.
  • Apple Photos (free) Part 2 – moving your Photos library to an external hard drive. Using Finder, under Favorites/Pictures find your Photos Library.photoslibrary file, then drag or copy it to your external drive. This can either become the primary location for your photos or act as a backup (second copy). I relabel the Photos Library.photoslibrary copy on the external drive something more descriptive, such as Photos2024 Library.photoslibrary. If you double-click this file or Option-Click the Photos app on the taskbar, you can select which .photoslibrary file you want to load. This will become your default Photos library until you select a different .photoslibrary or create a new one by option-clicking the Photos app.

  • Adobe Lightroom Classic (Windows or Mac, $12/mo 0r $120/yr) – I use Lightroom Classic to import, organize, and process my digital images. I dislike subscribing to software but what Lightroom offers plus the continual updates of new features, makes the small monthly fee tolerable.
    When importing a memory card or photos folder, Lightroom has options for adding keywords, copying the photos/videos to a specific folder, sorting by date, and creating or adding to a collection, avoiding duplicates. It’s a great tool for a serious photographer although there is a learning curve.
    A Lightroom catalog (how Lightroom organizes your photos) can organize photos/videos located in different locations. Plus you can have multiple (even duplicate) catalogs to organize photos by subject or a single huge catalog that contains all your photos. Apple Photos does not give you this option, other than to load .photoslibrary files from different location.
  • Adobe Photoshop w/ Adobe Bridge (Windows or Mac, $12/mo 0r $120/yr) – Adobe sells Lightroom & Photoshop separately but the bundled price is pretty much the same price. Adobe Bridge offers similar photo-navigation features as Lightroom Classic. So if you prefer Photoshop over Lightroom (I use both interactively), Bridge is useful to organize and navigate your photo library.

  • PhotoMove (Windows-only, free or $8 pro) – I use PhotoMove to organize all my iPhone photos and videos downloads. There are a couple Mac alternatives but they do not work as efficiently. So using PhotoMovePro ($8) on my Windows computer, I can organize all my iPhone photos into dated folders. Then I move these folders under the corresponding Lightroom folder then import them into Lightroom. Merging my iPhone photos with my mirrorless camera images. Since I often use a GoPro, iPhone, and mirrorless cameras when traveling. Photomove allows me to organize them into specific events. Lightroom could organize my iPhone downloads as well but having them pre-sorted before importing streamlines the process.

  • Photo Finder App – Queryable – ($5 MacOS, iPad & iPhone app) – this app does not organize your photos but is a great “fuzzy” search tool. Add a word or phrase to Queryable’s search field and it will display photos that match the word or phrase. It uses AI to search through all your photos and finds the matching photos. I’ve only used to a few times but it seems to do the job.

19 Mar 2025: Weather & Animals

Our March 19th meeting had 5 participants. Some members who could not attend were traveling or under-the-weather. This month’s themes were: Weather – with all the rain and snow lately, we thought this might be a timely subject. Alternatively, Animals are always a fun subject and this included birds, insects, pets, and zoo animal photos. Off-theme – March 13-14 there was a full blood moon lunar eclipse. With the rainy weather, no meetup or travel was planned with the photography group. But a few individuals were able to photograph the eclipse through breaks in the clouds. Here are the photos shared this month:

Barbara

Cathy

Gary

Sharon

Jim

19 Feb 2025: Passion Project Cont’d/Minimalism

The themes for February’s Photography Interest Group Zoom meeting were “Passion Project Cont’d” and “Minimalism”. Some participants last month did not get to present their passion project photos because they focused on their Favorites of 2024. We limit our photos to ~10 photos per participants so we have enough time during our meeting to discuss everyones images.
In addition to Passion Project Cont’d images, meeting attendees shared their Minimalistic or favorite non-theme images. Here are the images shared:

Barbara

Cathy

Gary

Mikky

Harold

Sharon

Jim