The latest speaker at Keswick Photographic Society was Guernsey based, Steven Le Provost. For many years a powerful force in UK photographic circles, Steven has judged both national and international competitions and has numerous distinctions from organisations such as the Royal Photographic Society and the London Salon of Photography.
He specialises in creating images that have a distinct “painterly” feel, using techniques in Photoshop that take a number of fairly ordinary initial photographs but blends them together in ingenious and creative ways.
Eschewing sharpness in favour of a degree of blurriness with colours “bleeding” into the background he aims to produce an end result which portrays mood, atmosphere and emotion. He showed us images of still life, mostly arrangements of flowers, images of the countryside, often with small figures within them and “made up” scenes on the beach and in cityscapes. He uses “layers” extensively.
These are backgrounds of mundane items such as peeling paint, an old wall, weathered wood or even the frosted glass of his front door, which can be adjusted in opacity on all or parts the image to create atmosphere and interest. Much of this process involves trial and error but in general what was striking is the creative imagination that is involved to envisage an end result that is both artistic and unique to him as a photographer.
It was a shame that this was a zoom talk, so the meeting could not view prints of his work but instead had to imagine how the images we were seeing on the screen would come to life on carefully selected art papers.
Tony Marsh