August
Summer; but It’s been like a series of Mondays all week: continuous rain, England lose a penalty shoot-out again, the Eurozone debt problems seem to be spreading, the search for a British Men’s Singles Tennis champion continues into the seventy seventh year and more trouble with bankers. ( I have come to the conclusion that ninety-nine percent of bankers give the rest a bad name.) Still we have the Fordingbridge Camera Club and the Olympics to look forward to – although I am not too hot on sport. The only sport I can manage as I get older is ‘hunt the spectacles.’

So what has the Fordingbridge Camera Club got to offer to cheer us up? Our club year has now come to an end but www.fordingbridgecameraclub.org.uk will soon list our planned events for the new autumn season. These will be a mixture of talks by visiting top photographers coupled with opportunities to show your work and have it commented on by experienced photographic judges. Until we re-start on 5th September we can take our cameras out and look for photo opportunities that will cheer us up. The shows at Ellingham (11 August) and Frogham (25 August) can offer these or our website can give you some extra photographic ideas. It has lots of interesting images, which could give you inspiration or the challenge to try doing even better. Even rain has its attraction for photographers: a lone figure huddled under an umbrella or the spray and lights of cars viewed from a motorway bridge have their attractions.

I suppose the air of pessimism throughout the world of economics has one advantage though; Greece and Spain probably remember the old saying “Always borrow money from a pessimist – they don’t expect it back.”