by David Terao

With the COVID-19 pandemic affecting the entire world, quarantine measures have been taken in many areas – globally, nationally and locally.  Here, in Maryland, all non-essential businesses and group activities including camera club meetings were cancelled in mid-March for the unforeseeable future.  But, such a little thing as a pandemic didn’t stop the Silver Spring Camera Club from continuing to hold photo competitions, host guest speakers and provide learning opportunities for its members. Those activities just had to be done differently – using virtual meetings through the Zoom application.

Most people never heard of Zoom before the pandemic.  Within a week from the issuance of stay-at-home orders,  the SSCC started adopting Zoom for conducting its meetings virtually, provided Zoom training sessions for its members, and launched into a new world of virtual camera club meetings.  

Using Zoom provided an easy-to-use platform for holding SSCC meetings.  The first “real” test of Zoom was for the SSCC Board meeting.  The virtual Board meeting went smoothly although there were no complicated challenges needed; just discussions between board members.  

The second SSCC meeting, with a guest speaker, provided the first real challenge with the guest speaker running her presentation from her own computer.  Again, no major obstacles occurred, and the program went smoothly from start to finish.  

The third meeting was our monthly competition.  This time, we used our usual competition software, Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Classic, for running the competition, and again there were no major issues.  Our competition judge was able to use an annotation feature of Zoom to mark-up and point out areas of images when making comments.  Everyone was able to see the projected images up close and personal and to hear the judge’s comments clearly.  Of course, we couldn’t hold our print competition.  So, as a compromise, “prints” were allowed to be submitted as electronic images.  

Lastly, our A Closer Focus meeting that provided the biggest challenge was held using Zoom, and again no major issues were encountered.  The challenge with the A Closer Focus meetings is that the meeting is more of an open forum with a variety of topics and structure.  For example, at our April meeting hosted by David Powell, we had four members giving presentations using various software on their own computers.  Pete Morton made a PowerPoint presentation to demonstrate how to make water-drop images using the Pluto trigger, David Blass showed how to replace a sky in an image using Photoshop layer techniques, Dennis Freeman explained everything you needed to know about infrared photography, and David Powell made a presentation on using natural light to photograph commonly found objects found around the house.  The last part of the meeting was a “show-and-tell” with members discussing one or two of their images.

A few interesting and beneficial outcomes were noted from holding virtual SSCC meetings.  First, members didn’t have to drive through rush-hour traffic to get to meetings.  Virtual meetings were very well attended; usually with more attendees than physical meetings.  The reason for this is, in part, due to some members living as far as Baltimore and rarely get to attend physical meetings.  Many members also commented on how much better is was to see images on their own computer and hear the dialog.  Some members even thought it might be worthwhile to keep running some meetings virtually even when we are allowed to get together again.  Although virtual meetings can’t replace physically gathering together and seeing each other in person, there were many positive aspects that came about from virtual meetings that we might want to consider continuing to use.