The Photo Club of Quail Creek (PCQC) continued with its monthly members’ contest with September having the topic of Monuments. Each club member could enter up to three photos taken in the last year. This subject was a more difficult one for the members and drew only 17 entries. All of the photos can be seen on our Flickr site tinyurl.com/yc3hexhe.
Jeff Krueger won first place with his photo Forward. Jeff commented, “I was up in Oshkosh, Wisc., for a week in July to photograph the annual EAA AirVenture air show. As we got there a day early, another photographer and I went downtown to check out the local camera store. Oshkosh is a great small town with a lot of interesting shops and parks along Main Street. Central Park had a great monument to Wisconsin’s part in the American Civil War. As it was very aged and very photogenic and, as usual, I had a camera in hand, I shot some images. I wanted to make the focus of the shot the monument, so I set my aperture to f/5.6 to reduce the depth of field and cropped into the main area of interest, to me anyway. My shutter speed was 1/320th of a second at ISO 125. Along with the shot, I did spend some money at the camera store.
Monte Hudson took second place with her photo Rough Rider. Monte commented, “The monument honors Roosevelt’s Rough Riders and sits in front of the Yavapai County Courthouse in Prescott. With the photo, I had the problem of subduing the background so that the bronze horse and rider would stand out. I used black and white and silver effects to accomplish that goal.” Monte used her iPhone 14 Pro, with other minor post-processing done in Lightroom.
The photo Mount Rushmore, by Jim Burkstrand, placed third. Jim said, “My wife Marilyn and I were on the 12th day of our road trip back to Minnesota. After a visit to Yellowstone, we headed to South Dakota to see Mount Rushmore and the Badlands. It had just stopped raining when we reached Rushmore, and the mountain and sky were pretty dull. I framed this shot with the state flags and the wet, green trees to add some color to the shot.” Jim used his Canon 90D with a Tamron 16-300 lens, shooting at 48mm, 1/800 sec at f/8.0, ISO 100. Global tonal edits were made in Adobe Lightroom.
The Photography Club of Quail Creek has a monthly photo contest for its members and schedules numerous photo field trips for members throughout the year. Meetings are held on the second Wednesday of the month at 7 p.m. at the Kino Conference Center, Ocotillo Room. Room venue could vary each month. Consult the club’s constantly updated website www.pcqc.org as well as the weekday HOA What’s Happening for additional information.