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This Sheffield-based club encourages its members to expand their photographic skills
Sheffield-based Westfield Photographic Club
When was the club founded?
Westfield Photographic Club was founded in the late 1970s, by a group of keen amateur photographers who wanted to share their interest and specialist skills with others. This ethos has carried through to this day, having successfully spanned technological advances, bringing more keen members to the club.
What does your club offer to new members?
A warm, welcoming and friendly atmosphere for members new and old. We support each other with technique and shared skills, and actively encourage each other, in particular our newer members. We like to build confidence in people which in turn opens up a range of ideas that they never knew they had.
Describe a typical club meeting.
There isn’t always a typical meeting because we like to give something new each week. We have our own internal competitions together with joint ones with neighbouring clubs using an external judge. These evenings are very informal and members are encouraged to enter, though if they prefer not to, then that’s fine. Practical evenings are also very popular with us. We can provide informal studio set-ups with backdrops and lighting, together with models. Last year we had some great nights with a team of Steampunks, and also a very colourful Burlesque dancer. These evenings were a great lesson in studio flash and were fun, too. We have also experimented with set-ups for improving our flash and shutterspeed work, such as water splash and product photography to name a couple.
Do you invite guest speakers?
From September to April once a month we have guest speakers. These days are very popular and we like to have a diverse range of experts talking to us about landscape, macro, and wildlife, together with specialists in printed images and professionals describing their journeys from roots to present day. Speakers and members particularly enjoy these evenings because we provide a tasty buffet that they don’t necessarily get anywhere else.
What are the most popular photographic genres among your members?
Some members like to concentrate on architecture, portrait, landscape, and still life. Other members like to have a go at everything. Whatever is chosen, the interests are diverse, and we actively encourage each other to explore new ways of enjoying our hobby.
Do members compete in competitions?
As a club, Westfield is a member of the Yorkshire Photographic Union and we take part in its annual competition. A number of our members are in the process of compiling images for CPAGB. As a result this has caused us to rethink our practice and the way we look at composition, while trying to note small defects that can creep unnoticed into an image. Challenging and enlightening times ahead, we think.
How many members you do have?
Westfield is a small club and at the moment we have 20 members. We are currently in the process of a new membership drive and we welcome people of all ages and skills.
Are residential trips or outings planned?
We are such a sociable club that we invite each other if any of us are having a photoshoot, or to join a course we might be attending, or even just a day out. This is actually an offshoot from our ‘Out and About’ sessions. Our members really enjoy working and playing together, especially if there’s tea and cake involved or even a pub visit.
Can you share any funny stories?
One that springs to mind is during a competition with a newly qualified judge, when one of our members had entered a black & white image of a rack of time cards from a mining museum. We think the judge was standing at the wrong angle to get the idea of the image and he found himself struggling to judge it at all, emitting rather a lot of ‘humm’ and ‘errm’ sounds. He even scratched his head a few times. Luckily, we all saw the funny side of it and laughed out loud, including the judge, and this incident gets talked about even now.
What are the club’s goals for the future?
Our future goals are to increase new membership and keep organising interesting and diverse nights for our members, together with exploring new and exciting developments in photography.
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