Thank you all for coming to our callout this past week! If you did not get a chance to make the callout, here is everything we talked about.

The Purdue Photography Club is a place where you can learn different techniques about photography in addition to meet some cool like-minded people. We have a variety of things planned for coming semester including new meeting topics, trips, and our annual photo contest.

Our meetings are now at 6:30pm (30 minutes earlier than last semester) in Third Street Suites room 159 (unless otherwise noted). So, even if you did not make it to our callout, feel free to join us at our first meeting (or any subsequent meeting).

Our first meeting, on January 30th, will be the Photography Buying Guide. In this meeting, we will be talking about photography gear to improve your photography, or if you even need to upgrade your camera or lens at all. In addition, we will talk about photography accessories that can help improve your photography.

The following meeting will be on landscape photography. In this meeting, we will not only learn the techniques to capture beautiful landscapes, but also how to plan to take landscape photos. We will show you good ways to predict the sun location, look at cloud formations, and other techniques to catch those epic sunsets. Also, thanks to our friends from PhotoPills, there will be a giveaway of one PhotoPills app license.

If you want to see the full meeting schedule, please visit our weekly meetings web page.

Aside from learning about photography and meeting others, we also have a lot of people that reach out to our club that are looking to hire a photographer. If you are looking to make some money with your photography, then our Facebook page is a good place to start.

Every spring semester, we host our photo contest. The judging date is on April 16th and the preparation date is March 12th where we will show you how to print and matte your photos. We have these 7 categories this year: Portraits, Landscapes, Architecture, Wildlife, Nature, Still Life, and Journalism. In addition, there will be cash prizes for the winners of the contest. More details will be announced later on in the semester.

We have a few trips planned this semester too. On the weekend (3/7) after our meeting on wildlife photography, we plan to go on a photo excursion to Celery Bog to practice and take some photos of native wildlife. On (or around) April 11th, we plan to head to Indiana Dunes National Park. A lot of you guys really wanted to go last semester, but we could not make it happen. So, we want to go this semester. Lastly, we are planning another astrophotography trip (around 4/21) as it was probably our most popular meeting and event of the fall semester. In addition, you will be able to see the Lyrids Meteor Shower. Be prepared to stay up through the night for the meteor showers.

We also have a darkroom and studio located in the basement of the Purdue Memorial Union (just for you!). So, if you are into film photography, we have the chemicals to develop film and enlargers to process prints. For the studio, we have two new studio lights with a hot shoe trigger, 4 new backdrops, benches, stools, props, a couple of product photography light boxes, a couple of 50mm lenses, some macro extension tubes, etc. The studio is great if you want to take some portraits or headshots. In addition, the product photography light boxes are great for small items, and well, product photography.

Any Purdue student, staff, or faculty can join our club regardless of skill level or photography gear. We do have membership dues of $5, but please do not pay if you are just checking out the club. In addition, if you want to have access to the studio or darkroom, the semester fee is $20. If you pay for the studio and darkroom access, you will receive an automated email with the instructions on how to access our facilities.

Thanks for reading our first blog post of the spring semester. We will continue to post blog posts through the semester to recap our meetings in case you want to review anything we learned about or just want to see some of the photos. In addition, if you have not already, please sign up for our email list on our homepage. If you do not receive our weekly emails, please check your Cisco Quarantine and add our email to your safelist to make sure you receive our future emails. We have included our two Lightroom Preset Packs from last semester in the welcome email too!

If you want to join our GroupMe to discuss photography topics in a more conversational way, please click here. We will not be sending any notifications for club events here, so it can be purely used for creating conversation.

Lastly, you can follow us on our Instagram page where we want to feature some of your work. Just tag us or use the hashtag #purduephotoclub and we will consider featuring your work. Also, you can join our Facebook group where you can ask questions or share some of your photos as well.