Edinburgh Photographic Society

For those interested in courses run by the EPS see the section below. We do not run formal courses as such- the closest is the course of Photoshop beginners workshops roughly every second Thursday during the season from Sept to May approx.   Other courses in Edinburgh   There are a few options for formal courses in Edinburgh, but on the whole, they tend to concentrate on specific areas especially B&W darkroom technique or Photoshop post-processing. The best and most cost-effective way to improve your general photography, and also learn these techniques and more, is to join an active camera club in your area. Everyone is in it for a genuine love of photography, and there are people of all levels and interests to learn from, whatever your preference of subject matter.   Some local courses:   Edinburgh City Council runs some Night classes which vary from year to year, sometimes covering B&W darkroom techniques, sometimes digital. They may appear under computing. http://ces.egfl.net/programme/   Stills Gallery on Cockburn St does some: http://www.stills.org/   Stevenson College do various courses http://www.stevenson.ac.uk/courses/ but make sure the course really is what you want and does not waste time and money doing stuff you don’t want or know already.   The Botanic Gardens sometimes does a couple of weekend courses on plant photography too.   Residential photographic holidays/workshops by pros around the country and abroad are great for total immersion on location (esp for landscape), but are short and usually work out at around £100 a day or more.   Learning at the Edinburgh Photographic Society   You could, of course, consider joining the EPS, there is lots of scope to learn whatever you are interested in at whatever level, be it digital techniques, composition, studio, darkroom, whatever. There are informal beginners courses on using the studio (with models), B&W and colour darkroom, and digital techniques, all included in the membership fee which is cheaper than any of the above courses and lasts for a whole year. The main club nights are Wednesdays, with a mixture of guest speakers and judging of our club competitions. The latter provides some of the best opportunities to get an honest critique of your and everybody else’s images and are a really good learning experience. And there are lots of opportunities to ask questions or get informal critique from a lot of friendly and very good photographers. There are several good pubs just round the corner for a post-meeting pint!   On Monday evenings the Creative-Digital group meets (see the sub-group section for more info). Of particular interest will be a series of workshop evenings on digital processing based on Photoshop, by professional Adobe qualified instructor Scott Russell, which are really excellent. There is also a group (Delos)  that meets every now and then for outings to local areas of interest, usually ending in a pub. Again, see the sub-group section for more info. The Phoenix group meets regularly for small group honest critique of each other’s work with a view to entering it in International competitive exhibitions or submitting panels for distinctions at the RPS, FIAP or PAGB.   Take a look at our programme on this web site and see if it takes your fancy. Come along to our September open night where anyone interested can come along and find out all about the activities, or to any Wednesday evening meeting during our Sept-May season to meet us and find out more.

To get on the mailing list: Fill out the form under the ‘Members’ menu item to email the webmaster with your membership number, and you will be added to the list.

Membership rates consist of several components which you can tailor to your needs. That way you only pay for what you need.
The components are:

Basic membership (standard, country member and student rates)

Optional extras:

Digital suite facilities

Studio facilities

Darkroom facilities

Just add up the different amounts and that is what you need to pay for the whole year.

See the menu item for all information on membership

Yes, members of the public are welcome to come along to Wednesday evening meetings. If you come along early, or stay on for tea/coffee after, please introduce yourself and you will be introduced to someone who can tell you more about our activities and facilities, and show you around. Obviously, if you want to come to several Wednesday talks, we’d rather you joined!

If you’d like to come along to a Monday talk, please use the contact form to ask the ‘Creative Digital Group’ contact first, so they can expect you.

The site does not have any area that requires a member login. The login link (in the Members menu) is only there for those who have been given subscriber or editor rights to post items or pages.

The reasons we had a site registration and login on the old site many years ago was to
a) allow people to comment on items. This rarely happened in all the years it was up, and can now be safely allowed using captchas and moderation instead.
b) allow people to post. So few people did this, that it was easier to just set up an account for those that need to.
c) allow pass-through to login to the forum. This was rarely used and has been dropped.
d) allow pass-through login to the image gallery site. Few people used this to upload images, and fewer still to comment, so this has also been dropped.

On the old site, you did not need to log in to see anything, with a very few exceptions – see below. This was a common misunderstanding that led to hundreds of unnecessary registrations, even from non-members.

For the very few things we might want to make members only (like the bulletin past issues), it is easier to put it in a password-protected page and circulate the password.

For Galleries, we are mostly using embedded Flickr galleries, as many members already have accounts, for they are free to create and give 1 terabyte of storage for free. From there, images can be added to the appropriate EPS Flickr group. At the moment we only have the DeLOS and C-D group Groups, but we will be making more. We also have an EPS Flickr account which we could use to upload images from anyone without a Flickr account, with full attribution. We can also set up galleries locally on the site.