Meetings (usually) take place on the second Monday evening of each month, except during December. Meeting specifics (time, location) are found in the posts to our Facebook Group, as well as reminder posts on Substack. On occasion the schedule is munged a bit to accommodate conflicts. We strive to provide a great deal of notice when this happens.
Meeting structure is simple:
Everyone is invited. There are no dues, no roll call, no expectations. We want you here, and we hope you want to be here.
New folks will be acknowledged, and given the opportunity to introduce themselves.
Brief announcements, usually about upcoming Rambles. All are invited to share information about exhibits that they are part of, as well as any other events that might be of interest.
Photographer of the Month: we are introduced to someone (national or international) that we probably don't know about, but is doing interesting and unusual work.
Image Discussions: this is the main purpose of RRIC. We spend time looking at images submitted by participants, and talking about how we respond to it, how we feel about the artistic merits, where was the maker successful, or perhaps less so. The images are shown, and the title announced, but the maker is anonymous. We believe that this approach fosters a separation of critique from personality, and fosters an environment wherein we discuss what we see in the image, and only that. In other words, it's always about the work.
Regarding monthly themes: we use themes to both direct and challenge you. There is no requirement to adhere to the theme; it's intended as a guide. There is also no time limit for the creation of an image. You may submit something new, or something from your back catalog.
Image Submission
Note: A few more tweaks to the image submission procedure.
If you plan to attend a meeting, and would like to get some input on your work, please submit 1 or 2 images. Image parameters are:
● JPG format
● 80% quality or better
Please retain the EXIF data! If your are using Lightroom, please include "All Metadata" when exporting your images.
We prefer full size images, because sometimes we pixel-peep. But at the very least images should be between 2000 and 3840 pixels on the horizontal edge, or at least 2000 vertical.
Experiment with quality setting (which affects file size), which can be 8 or 9 when saving to JPG format in Photoshop, or 80% in Lightroom. If you are using Lightroom, (in the Export dialog) limit the length of the long edge to keep the file size modest. If in Photoshop, from the File menu, use the "Export" / "Export As" operation to create a JPG.
Please rename your images before sending using this format (with either a hyphen or underscore between parts):
● Last Name - First Name
● -Date or Theme (MonYY, YYYYMMDD, etc, or this month's theme)
● -Title (spaces, hyphens or underscores between words).
We strongly encourage a title, to help direct the viewer. As an example, if I were to submit a photo of "who knows what?" for April, I would use "Hook_Gary-Apr2025-Who_Knows_What.jpg".
This simple step turns out to be incredibly helpful to us. We thank you!
No more email, please. Discussion images should now be uploaded to this Dropbox folder:
When you upload your image, you will get a confirmation that the uploaded completed, but you will not have access to the folder. Note that there is no "logging in" required. This link should work from a desktop/laptop, or phone.
The deadline for submissions will be Sunday evening (midnight) the day before the meeting.
Bill will send out a summary confirmation on Monday morning. Any late arrivals may or may not be accommodated.
We will start using a timer during discussions to ensure that each image receives comparable attention. Running out of time before we run out of images is not our intention.