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First FFP Seminar

On the 19th of January the first FFP seminar was held in Stock. I had to stretch technology to its limits as I had two digital projectors; one showing the images the other showing a clone of the laptop screen.

The seminar was split into two main parts; the first half was concerned with preparing images, or how to make it easier for club members to prepare images for FFP. The second half was using FFP in more detail.

Preparing images correctly - making the images an appropriate size, and adding the author name and title - seems to require continual reminders for members and in our camera club we try and do a "reminder" once or twice a year. One problem I'd recently noted was that the Powertoy for XP which allows one to resize multiple images in one go doesn't work with Vista. However, I had found VSO image resizer which is functionally very similar but does worth with Vista.

Using FFP itself partly covered what was new in version 1.4 - a summary is in the readme file. I also ran through the various competitions that FFP supports; my experience is that camera clubs tend not to introduce new competitions so many users had not seen the alternative competitions available - I was interested to see the Knockout competition actually run.

Most usefully for me was to hear suggestions from the users about how the program could be improved; one suggestion which has just made it into 1.4 is the facility to sort the images by Score. Another - to briefly display the score on the projected image when it has been entered by the operator - will go into 1.5.

Chris from Mill Camera Group was present and took several photographs - I'm afraid to say they will appear here soon.