For budding photographers, gaining exposure is virtually synonymous with raking in Instagram likes nowadays.
Among the online platforms where photogs can freely showcase their portfolios, Zoom doesn’t stand out as an obvious go-to. But it’s the place to be for local lensmen hoping to bump up their résumés with a nationally recognized accolade.
Each month of the year, the Santa Maria Camera Club—a branch of the Photographic Society of America—hosts a juried photography competition over Zoom. While the local chapter’s in-person programs date back to 1938, its monthly contest took on a virtual format in 2020.
Club members are allowed to submit up to three photos per month, and prospective participants or anyone curious about the historic club can tune in to these Zoom meetings for free and get a taste of the judgment proceedings.
Every submission gets screen time during the Zoom call and receives remarks before getting scored. The virtual format allows the group to recruit professional photographers from both near and far—whether they’re local or from across the country—to serve as judges.
“The judge will go through one [photo] at a time [live on camera],” club member Heidi Gruetzemacher said. “I have to appreciate people willing to do that, because it’s exhausting. … I remember feeling a little pressure.”
Gruetzemacher has been on both sides of the bench. A retired portrait photographer, she was approached by the Santa Maria Camera Club to judge a handful of in-person competitions during the 1990s—decades before she became a club member herself.
She decided to start competing in the club’s monthly contests earlier this year, after embracing a more abstract approach with her work, although she still shoots traditional portraits on occasion, and she received an honorable mention in February for one of them.
“Now that I’ve retired, if I do a portrait, it’s only because I want to do it. It’s not about pleasing a client,” Gruetzemacher said. “It’s almost like I had to let my brain forget … that mindset.”
Some of Gruetzemacher’s abstract long-exposure pieces, amplified with a neutral-density filter, look more like paintings than photographs upon a first glance. Several club members specialize in similarly surreal photos, and many use Photoshop and other software to manipulate their images.
The Santa Maria Camera Club accepts altered and unaltered photographs alike, as long as they’re wholly original images, created from scratch by their respective artists, club President Jeanne Sparks explained.
“There’s people who do composites quite often, … and some just keep it pretty close to how it came out of the camera,” Sparks said. “We allow anything as long as it’s your own image.”
A former photojournalist and Santa Maria Times columnist, Sparks enjoys membership with multiple photography collectives, some of which hold competitions with journalistic categories that don’t allow manipulation.
“With those, you can’t manipulate. … You can’t take anything out or bring anything in that wasn’t there,” said Sparks, who’s credited with several photos that adhere to this criteria, including images of decimated roadways and other destruction in the aftermath of California’s January 2023 storm.
On the other hand, she’s no stranger to adding subtle flourishes to her whimsical wildlife scenes, often focused on pelicans, spoonbills, hawks, and other avians. Sometimes she’ll play with a photo’s background or the sky, for example, and add—or obliterate—a few clouds here and there.
“Most of our people are doing something in Photoshop to enhance [their work],” said Sparks, who specified that many club members play with lighting and saturation levels. “But the camera records a lot more levels of detail than it may actually show you right off the bat, so you just tell it to make those levels show up better.”
While a majority of Santa Maria Camera Club members use digital cameras, there are two active members who frequently shoot with film, Sparks said. There are also members who occasionally enter photos taken on their phones, while at least one member solely does so, she added.
Some club outsiders may assume that the group leans toward old-school photography practices, or only caters to older demographics. Neither is true, Sparks said. But the club’s headquarters doesn’t help dispel those misconceptions.
“Don’t be deterred by it being a retirement home,” Sparks said.
Thanks to a generous perpetuity instated by late philanthropist, eye surgeon, and club alumnus Dennis Shepard (1932-2016), the local group is able to hold its in-person gatherings without rental dues at Merrill Gardens, a senior living community in Santa Maria.
It was known as Arbor View when Shepard owned it, before selling the facility to Merrill Gardens in 2006. Unlike the facility’s residence requirements, the Santa Maria Camera Club’s membership is open to all ages. Currently, the club’s youngest members are in their 30s, while its oldest are in their 70s, Sparks said.
“Although we are heavily represented on the older side, … we have some younger people, and we’d be happy to have some more younger people,” Sparks said. “I think that they would find that we’re keeping up with the technology, and we’re doing things in Photoshop and Lightroom that are new and exciting.”
Fieldwork and field trips
2024 marks Sparks’ third year serving as the Santa Maria Camera Club’s president and 21st year as a member. Based on her body of wildlife and outdoor landscape work, her overall aim as a photographer comes as no surprise: “to inspire people to love nature; to protect and enhance it.”
Over the years, she’s found many ways to intersect her two passions—photography and the environment—including her habitat advocacy work with the Santa Barbara County Action Network (SBCAN). She and her husband, Ken Hough, are the nonprofit’s co-executive directors.
In early October, Sparks participated in the first entry of a new lecture-style seminar series with the Santa Maria Camera Club that allowed her to showcase photos she took as part of her duties with SBCAN.
“We’ve been getting involved in some projects where I get to use my photography to help educate on what’s going on,” said Sparks, who discussed some of her drone photos that document reconstruction efforts in the Santa Maria Riverbed after it flooded in early 2023.
Sparks isn’t the only Santa Maria Club member whose career and art outputs often align, since many members are either active or retired professional photographers.
Originally from Los Angeles, Avila Beach resident and club member Chuck Uebele is a veteran of the aerospace industry whose past roles include photographer positions at Vandenberg Space Force Base.
“I used to cover launches; now I shoot them for fun,” said Uebele, a member since 2017. “Whenever there’s a launch and it’s somewhat clear, I try to take pictures of it.”
Uebele’s former career entailed a much more intimate look at Vandenberg’s rockets, however.
“They required that we take pictures of every single component and how each thing was fabricated and put together in case there was a failure after they launched it,” recalled Uebele, who meticulously photographed every inch, nook, and cranny of the rockets he was assigned to. “[Then] they could go back to the pictures and try and troubleshoot things.”
Uebele was retired by the time he joined the Santa Maria Camera Club, which he embraced simply as a way to meet new people who shared his interest. One of his favorite aspects of the club is that members often coordinate group field trips.
Past destinations include the historic Preston Castle in Ione and The Getty Center in LA, while other expeditions stick with Central Coast settings, requiring less travel but occasionally more elaborate planning.
One day in Grover Beach, the club arranged for a group of professional horse riders to gallop along the shoreline for members—and lucky passersby—to enjoy photographing if they wished.
Uebele fondly remembers the golden hour glow during the sunset shoot.
“I got one with the sun behind them and all four feet off the ground,” said Uebele, whose trotting horse subject echoed the iconic stance found in 1877’s The Horse in Motion sequential photo series—frequently regarded as the dawn of cinema among historians.
After the shoot, Uebele used a customized script on Photoshop to create “random thickness lines” within his horse photo, with a gradient applied to each line, he said.
The Grover Beach expedition was a chance for Uebele and other participating Camera Club members to tackle a mutual subject with varying approaches and later compare results with one another and discuss their respective decisions made behind the lens and in the editing process.
Orcutt resident Jim McKinniss, for instance, made a conscious effort that day to ensure his monochrome horse rider photos invoked a distinct, haunting aura.
“I used the slow shutter,” said McKinniss, who became a club member in 2016.
The slow shutter speed, which is well known among photographers as a tool to blur motion, gave McKinniss the otherworldly result he was after.
“The horses were distorted,” he said. “They looked more like ghosts.”
Welcome to the darkroom
When digital cameras became mainstream in the late 1990s, McKinniss was initially committed to going against the grain, simply by sticking with film.
Today, his digital portfolio amounts to more than four terabytes of images.
“I was pretty dead set against digital. I was always going to be a film guy,” said McKinniss, who eventually succumbed to buying a digital camera after observing a friend use one.
“There’s just so many advantages [with digital] for someone like me,” McKinniss said, “and it’s less expensive.”
Like McKinniss and the majority of Santa Maria Camera Club members, Uebele exclusively shoots on digital but began as a film photographer, entranced by film from a young age.
“My parents were very into photography, and I loved looking into the viewfinder of their cameras,” Uebele recalled.
Some of Uebele’s earliest memories stem from his household’s darkroom, where his father would process photos taken during family outings and vacations.
“My dad used to print his own black-and-white, so I was fascinated by that and would sit in the darkroom with him,” Uebele said. “I don’t remember the first time [being in a darkroom], but I definitely remember just being fascinated by how the image came up on the paper. That really intrigued me.”
He found himself in darkrooms for a while from then on, between a yearbook class he took in high school, his first assistant photographer job as a teen, and while studying photography during his college years.
“All my roommates were photographers, so we turned one of the rooms [in the apartment] into a darkroom,” Uebele said with a laugh.
Despite moments of childhood and young adulthood nostalgia, Uebele said he felt relieved when digital cameras became prominent during the latter part of his career.
“Until digital came up, I spent a lot of time in the darkroom on my feet,” Uebele said. “When digital came out, it was like I could finally sit down. So I didn’t miss working in the darkroom at all.”
One lasting impact of Uebele’s darkroom days is he’s become rather indifferent to whether his lights are on or off.
“I got to the point where you get really used to working in the dark,” he said. “My wife always tells me to turn the lights on.”
Flip a switch and reach Arts Editor Caleb Wiseblood at cwiseblood@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Oct 17-27, 2024.