In preparation for the Themed April Competition "Old," we will be having an image critique on April 12th.  Our critics, from the club's NVACC trained judges, will include Tom Brett, Sandi Croan and Steve Passman.  Critiques are an opportunity for club members to get a more detailed explanation of what is most effective about their work, and where it could be improved in the eyes of the critics.  As always, we will attempt to accommodate as many images as possible.

Tom Brett is retired from the US Army and has developed photography into a second career, photographing weddings and events.  In training for his new career he took every class that Northern Virginia Community College offers regarding photography and every class that Joe Miller has offered at the Joseph Miller Center for the Photographic Arts.  He also attended a Freeman Patterson workshop in Africa, where he took an extra week after the workshop to go on safari and photograph some of Africa's big game.

He has selflessly served on the NVPS board for the last eleven of his twelve years as a member and is the current NVPS Past-President.  He has done so much for the club over the years that he is an NVPS Distinguished Service Award winner as well.

Tom's images have appeared in various printed material, and he is a four-time winner of NVPS's Photographer of the Year Award.  You can see some of Tom's work on his website at:  http://www.tombrettphotography.com 

Sandi Croan is an independent artist from Centreville who has been living in Northern Virginia since 1978. She specializes in landscape, nature, and travel photography with an eye for capturing the unique and creating fine art for homes and offices.

Sandi has won numerous competitions and awards for her fine art photographs. In 2008, she was awarded Photographer of the Year and Print of the Year by the Northern Virginia Photographic Society and she won both Best in Show and 2nd Place at the juried Meadowlark Photo Expo in Vienna, VA. Her images have been selected to be put on permanent display at Meadowlark Botanical Gardens and the Joseph Miller Center for the Photographic Arts. She has been juried into numerous art shows including; the prestigious VisArts of Rockville Exhibitions, Fairfax County Council of the Arts Show (Unlocked), and The Fraser Gallery International Photography Exhibition. Sandi was a featured artist in Elan Magazine, and her photograph "Blue Lagoon" was on the cover. She has also had photographs published in other local and national magazines.

Sandi has sold many of her photographs to private, corporate and government clients, and does shows for businesses and other local events. In addition, Sandi has recently/or currently is displaying her art at Broadway Gallery in The Promenade shopping center in Fairfax, VA, The Blue Iguana restaurant in Fairfax, Meadowlark Gardens, Cub Run Recreation Center, Trummers on Main Street Restaurant, and the Fairfax County Government Center.

In addition to her fine art photography, Sandi is an outdoor portrait photographer specializing in children at play in natural settings and portfolio/marketing photos for models, actors and teen pageant competitors.  She captures the essence, personality and beauty of all of her clients.

Sandi has been an active member of the Northern Virginia Photographic Society (NVPS) since 2004 and has served in a variety of board positions. She is currently serving in her second year as President of NVPS (2009-2011).  She also is a speaker and serves as a judge for area photographic clubs, competitions and exhibitions.

You can see a sample of Sandi's work on www.sandicroanphotography.com. 

Steve Passman has been a serious photographer since he was eleven years old. He has the distinction of having once been the youngest member of the Norfolk Photography Club, an organization now sixty years old. He wasn't a founding member, though. Steve's academic work was at Georgia Tech and Johns Hopkins, and he has been faculty member at the Naval Academy, Georgia Tech, and the University of Maryland University College, as well as research mathematician at Sandia National Laboratories. He also has done diplomatic work related to nuclear nonproliferation.

Through all of this, Steve has been an active photographer. His travels in Western Europe, Russia, Asia, and Africa have given him ample opportunity to photograph in a variety of settings and in often interesting weather. In those places, rather than seeing as a tourist, he has concentrated on work that gives a feel of being inside the culture. His faithful Nikon cameras have failed him but once, unfortunately on a bicycle trip in Ireland. A favorite camera in his early work was a 4x5 Speed Graphic, and he still uses the Rolleiflex he bought with earnings from photographing sweet sixteen parties when he was a high school student. 

In addition to photography, Steve has worked in charcoal and oil on canvas. Steve's recent foreign trips have been to Cyprus, Israel, Mali, and Baltimore. However and even with an intense interest in photojournalism, he finds and encourages others to find a wealth of subjects to photograph close to home. 

In addition to teaching and photography, Steve is an enthusiastic cook and a widely published writer. He's also the author of the NVACC website.

Please submit your images by 6:00 pm on Monday, 11 April so that I can get the images sorted and copied onto media for Tuesday evening.  Images should be numbered in order of preference and have the photographer's name included for the critique, e.g., 1-JoeSmith.jpg, 2-JoeSmith, 3-JoeSmith.jpg.  Putting the number before the name allows us to use the computer to automatically sort the images.  Please size the images in accordance with the digital competition rules and email the images to critique@nospam!#*&^#)type address - don't copy spam protection(*@.@nospamnvps.org.

For those who are new to the club, typical critique sessions will cover two images from all submitters and occasionally are able to get into the 3rd round of images before running out of time.  Please number your images accordingly.

Questions can be addressed to Matthew Schmidt at mgs@nospam!#*&^#)type address - don't copy spam protection(*@.@nospamloreleistudios.com.