The camera club I belong to in Santa Barbara is affiliated with the Photographic Society of America. Our club leadership regularly encourages use to join.
Anyone out there have any experience with this group?
There are a couple more national societies in the USA. //www.asmp.org , //apanational.org . Joining a local branch also gives access to events in other cities, if one happens to be traveling or moving. Portfolio reviews are one of the reasons to join. If that's something you're interested in, I'd look at prior review events and see what kind of reviewers were attending. Comparing those between all groups and local chapter event frequency.
The camera club I belong to was a member for a couple of years. We dropped it, mostly due to their complicated website. None of our members joined as individuals.
I belonged to two different camera clubs locally for a short while.
I get *so* much more information, relevant techniques, help, and perspective by being active here.
Sometimes it was almost like shooting fish in a barrel doing the club contests.....it was pretty easy to clean house simply because I have so much broader of a knowledge base on camera operation & processing from all the help I've gotten here.
I embarrassed one of our instructors (unintentionally) at a seminar he conducted simply by imparting a technique for B&W conversion I learned from one of you guys......he'd never seen it, and it hadn't occurred to him to try it.
All of the "Professional" orgs I've seen all want you to have an established port and/or business to join.
Like Groucho said....."I'd never belong to a club that would accept me.".
