A View from the Serving Hatch

Pre-Season Edition 2025/26

An occasional blog by Alan Keen

I hope you all have had a good break since our last meeting at the beginning of May.

We are now just a few weeks away from the start of our new season on 16th September 2025, and I thought it was an appropriate time to bring you up to date with much of the behind-the-scenes preparation that has happened. A lot has changed!

1.The Financial Situation

As reported at the AGM, for the second year running our outgoings exceeded income and the Club’s reserves were not looking healthy. This meant that we had to look at ways of reducing costs and increasing income. Things we considered were finding a cheaper venue, reducing the meeting time, and having some “stay at home” Zoom meetings.

Due to the generosity of many Club members, who donated their travel expense money from their YPU Exhibition work and a £1000 donation from a benefactor our financial situation means we no longer need to introduce such drastic changes. This means that:

a. We will stay at our current venue St Paul’s Church Hall.

b. Our meeting times will remain the same

c. A few “stay at home” Zoom meetings will be introduced for PDI

Competitions.

Depending on the income from membership fees we might have to review the situation for next year.

2.The New Website

Thanks to a lot of work by Steve Dormer, we now have a working new website with the same domain name as the old one Home – Doncaster Camera Club. I hope you will visit it and find the new layout easy to use and informative. As with most websites it will only work if it is kept up to date and is refresh regularly. One way you can help is to provide, up to 10 images, of your work to go into the members area. You can also submit other material, such as articles, dates of upcoming events etc. for consideration.

3.The Programme

The New Programme is almost complete. To paraphrase Eric Morcambe “We have all the right speakers just not in the right order”! Alan Thorpe and Ray arespending the next few days confirming dates and putting the final touches to it. We hope to have the full Programme published on the website within a week or so.

4.Internal Competitions

Nick has been working hard to revamp the competition rules and some minor changes to the Rounds Competitions.

There is a full section on the website dedicated to internal competitions, with downloadable pdf documents covering:

a. Competition Rules

b. Scoring System

c. Biographies of the Judges (coming soon)

There is also a results section with information about previous competitions.

5.The YPU Exhibition

I think most people would agree that our hosting of the 2025 YPU Exhibition was a great success. The Danum Gallery monitored attendance and ran a visitors’ book. They were incredibly pleased with the outcome. The Exhibition was dismantled on the 7th July and the prints, which were not chosen for the travelling exhibition are now in storage waiting to be returned to the Yorkshire clubs. Doncaster’s prints, if you have not already collected them, will be available at our first meeting on 16th September.

Without the tremendous help from many of our members this would have been a difficult task to achieve so I thank all those who helped. It is very much appreciated. I would like to single out Alan Thorpe for recognition for the untiring work and effort he put in over many months of planning and putting all the pieces together to make a memorable event.

6.DCC Annual Exhibition

There was no DCC Annual Exhibition in 2025 because of the YPU Exhibition taking its place. However, we would like to start work on the 2026 one shortly. The problem we have is that the Danum Art Gallery is fully booked until January 2028, so we need to find another venue for our exhibition for the next two years.

If any members have suggestions then we would like to hear from you.

Happy Snapping!

See you on 16th September 2025 for 7.30pm

Alan Keen 12th August 2025