Year: 2014

Gayle Larkin Becomes A Distinguished Toastmaster

Photo by Richard Daugherty On Saturday November 8th, 2014, Lensmasters’ Secretary, Gayle Larkin, is presented with the highest educational award in Toastmasters, the Distinguished Toastmaster. Seen here with Distinguished Toastmaster Norm Stein (left) and Founder’s District Governor and Distinguished Toastmaster Linda Ulrich (right) at the 2014 Fall District Conference. Gayle and her husband, Frank Larkin, joined Toastmasters when his best friend, Terry McCann, said “Frank, why don’t you and Gayle join Toastmasters and do your CTM (Competent Toastmaster) before I retire in August. If you do, I’ll sign your certificates.” Terry retired after 25 years as the Executive Director of…

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How To Pose People

Our workshop last Wednesday (August 27, 2014) was focused on how to pose people and communicate with your model. I selected a young girl to model for us who has not had any prior experience modeling for photographers. Some photographers work with models all the time, but many do not. Our everyday photographers are usually photographing family and friends so I thought it would be a good idea to practice how to work with inexperienced people to get interesting photos. Choosing the subject of your photo is the easiest part of the process, but one should also consider what’s going…

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A Walk in the Woods

Since Lensmasters is a specialty Toastmasters club, we regularly engage in extracurricular activities. Sometimes, we do adventurous – even dangerous – things … like walking in the woods with Poison Ivy. Recently, several of our club members came together for an exciting and educational photo shoot in a fabulous location – Santiago Oaks Regional Park in Orange, California. This photo walk was arranged by our Vice President of Membership Gary Olive, who also coordinated our model, Carly Haas, dressed as the comic book character Poison Ivy. Carly was a fabulous model for us, and the location was perfectly suited to…

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The Warehouse Meeting

It doesn’t happen very often but occasionally communication gets crossed and we get double booked for our regular meeting room. The community room at REI is a very nice meeting place with everything you could want in a meeting room, but is also very popular. When we arrived at our regular time the room was already in use by another group. The staff at REI apologized for the misunderstanding and offered for us to meet in an area in their warehouse in the back. We checked it out and while not ideal, it was rather cozy. Since our group was…

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