2026-27 Season Overview

Welcome back everyone!

As is our tradition, our first event of the season is our Summer Mini Show today. Due to a special event at the First Parish, we have had to change the venue for this first meeting to the Weston Public Library. To accommodate the Library's 9pm closing time, we are starting the meeting early, at 6:45pm.

Thanks to Pam Naab's leadership and the entire Program Committee, our entire 2026-27 is planned out in terms of talks, competitions, print shows and critiques. We're still finalizing our outings, but all the rest can be found on our new and improved Schedule page (thank you Michael Heimlich!). The Schedule now has all the competition topics and deadlines along with all the print show dates and deadlines. We hope these will help you to better plan ahead. When you're browsing the schedule, note that you can now use a drop-down menu to see our schedules from the past 5 years. There's also now a link to a calendar so that you can automatically add events to your own calendar.

As we announced at the end of last season, this will be our first season trying out a new scheme for competition judging. Judges will no longer be providing numerical rankings for photos. Instead, photos will be presented in random or thematic order. Each photographer's name will be announced along with the title of the work. At the end of each group, the judge will present an honorable mention and the images that placed 1st, 2nd, and 3rd. We hope that this system will put more emphasis on critique and will also allow members to associate images with their creators. Thanks to Jason Katz for writing up excellent new guidelines for our judges. The Competition Committee is also working on an AI policy for competition images and should be available shortly.

No camera club season would be complete without a few surprises. We discovered several weeks ago that the West Newton Cinema renovation would not be completed in time for our print show. Fortunately, another pleasant surprise followed that revelation, and we were invited to take over all the gallery space in Newton City Hall, so we will be returning to that venue this season for a January-March show. Thanks to Ellen Foust and Helen Makadia for navigating those upheavals. In total this season, we will have four rotations at Opus for those who are ready to undertake a small solo show, and three club-wide print shows: City Hall (Jan-Mar), Newton Free Library (Apr), and Cooper Center (Jun-Aug). Ellen and Helen are also working on updated framing guidelines for our print shows, so stay tuned for those details.

Related to the topic of print shows, we are hoping to find someone to volunteer to help out with social media. This would be for the club as a whole, but with a particularly emphasis on finding an audience for our print shows.

As always, if you have questions, suggestions, feedback, or want to volunteer, don't hesitate to get in touch by emailing info@NewtonCameraClub.org.

Nicole Mordecai

NCC President