FOLEY, Ala. — A photograph of Our Lady of Bon Secour Catholic Church took first place in the Coastal Photography Club’s August competition, earning Margret Hildreth the month’s top honor.
The competition theme was country churches.
The Subject
Our Lady of Bon Secour Catholic Church sits in the Bon Secour community of Baldwin County, a small fishing settlement south of Foley near the Bon Secour River. The name, from the French for “safe harbor,” attaches to the river, the community and the national wildlife refuge nearby.
It is the kind of subject a country-church theme is written for: a modest building in a settlement small enough that the church functions as a landmark, set in the flat coastal landscape of south Baldwin County.
Why Country Churches Make a Good Competition Theme
Rural churches are a staple of Southern photography for practical reasons as much as sentimental ones. They are usually the tallest structure for some distance, which gives a photographer a clean subject against open sky. They are almost always accessible from a public road. And they tend to be architecturally simple, which puts the burden of the image on light, weather and framing rather than on ornament.
A themed competition also does something a general one does not: it forces every entrant to solve the same problem. When the subject is fixed, the differences between entries come down to the choices a photographer made — time of day, angle, depth of field, whether to include the surroundings or isolate the building.
The Club’s Next Meeting
The Coastal Photography Club next meets Sept. 24 at the new Foley Community Public Library, 230 East Orange St., at 1 p.m.
The club meets on the fourth Thursday of every month at that location and time. Meetings are free and open to non-members.
For more information, the contact number is (850) 207-1908.
An Open Door
The free-and-open-to-non-members policy is worth noting for anyone who has considered joining a camera club and hesitated. It means a prospective member can attend, watch a critique or a presentation, and decide afterward whether the group suits them — without a commitment or a fee at the door.
Local photography clubs typically structure their meetings around some combination of monthly competitions, member critiques, technical presentations and occasional field outings. For photographers working alone, the value is usually less about equipment advice than about having other people look hard at your work and say what they see.
The New Foley Library as a Venue
The club’s meeting location, the new Foley Community Public Library on East Orange Street, reflects a pattern common across Baldwin County, where public libraries serve as meeting space for community organizations that have no building of their own.
For a club like this one, a library meeting room offers what it needs: a projector-friendly space, a central location, parking, and no rental cost that would have to be passed along to members.
Photographing the Coast
Baldwin County offers a wide range of subject matter for a camera club within a short drive: the Gulf beaches at Gulf Shores and Orange Beach, the working waterfront at Bon Secour, the Bon Secour National Wildlife Refuge, agricultural land in the county’s interior, and historic structures scattered across the older communities.
The August theme drew on one thread of that. The variety is part of why clubs in the area can run themed monthly competitions year after year without exhausting the available material.