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Jo Knight is one of Keswick’s most creative members. Her images have won many prestigious awards including Honourable Mentions in 2021, 2022 and 2023 in the International Photography Awards. This is a competition that recognises photography’s leading talents. It attracts thousands of entries from over 120 countries around the world.

Tonight, Jo gave a master class in how to combine images to create a composite using a variety of tools available in Photoshop. This is a software programme designed for both photographers and graphic artists. Jo used her image “Broken but Free” to demonstrate the various techniques she employs to put together a composite. To create this particular image, she photographed herself dressed, and made up, as a doll. She said that she had used U Tube to research her makeup. Jo uses a small bedroom in her cottage as a studio for taking photos and she photographed herself against a purpose made backdrop.

Jo explained that her first step was to put together a background. Her starting point was a blank canvas created in Photoshop to which she added the backdrop that she had photographed herself against, an image of floorboards and lastly an image of a skirting board. Once the background was completed to her satisfaction, she added the image of herself. After this she added legs, feet, arms and hands from a photograph of a small artist’s mannequin. She then added a hand with string attached to the fingers and made it appear that it was emerging from the wall behind her. The final touch was to add strings that appeared to have been attached to her body but then cut.

At every stage Jo detailed the processes she undertook, and the adjustments she made to make the various component images fit together and look natural. This was a time-consuming exercise requiring a significant amount of work and expertise. Her well-deserved success has obviously been the result of her meticulous attention to detail as well as her enormously creative approach to photography. She explained that she can spend weeks thinking about the composition of an image and the story that she wants it to tell. Throughout her talk Jo gave useful tips about how to make the most of Photoshop and how to make composites work. Both those just starting to use Photoshop and those with more experience found this a useful and interesting talk. Jo’s style of presentation is very clear and easy to understand and this was an excellent evening.

If you would like to find out more about Jo and her work her website address is

Jo Knight is one of Keswick’s most creative members. Her images have won many prestigious awards including Honourable Mentions in 2021, 2022 and 2023 in the International Photography Awards. This is a competition that recognises photography’s leading talents. It attracts thousands of entries from over 120 countries around the world.

Tonight, Jo gave a master class in how to combine images to create a composite using a variety of tools available in Photoshop. This is a software programme designed for both photographers and graphic artists. Jo used her image “Broken but Free” to demonstrate the various techniques she employs to put together a composite. To create this particular image, she photographed herself dressed, and made up, as a doll. She said that she had used U Tube to research her makeup. Jo uses a small bedroom in her cottage as a studio for taking photos and she photographed herself against a purpose made backdrop.

Jo explained that her first step was to put together a background. Her starting point was a blank canvas created in Photoshop to which she added the backdrop that she had photographed herself against, an image of floorboards and lastly an image of a skirting board. Once the background was completed to her satisfaction, she added the image of herself. After this she added legs, feet, arms and hands from a photograph of a small artist’s mannequin. She then added a hand with string attached to the fingers and made it appear that it was emerging from the wall behind her. The final touch was to add strings that appeared to have been attached to her body but then cut.

At every stage Jo detailed the processes she undertook, and the adjustments she made to make the various component images fit together and look natural. This was a time-consuming exercise requiring a significant amount of work and expertise. Her well-deserved success has obviously been the result of her meticulous attention to detail as well as her enormously creative approach to photography. She explained that she can spend weeks thinking about the composition of an image and the story that she wants it to tell. Throughout her talk Jo gave useful tips about how to make the most of Photoshop and how to make composites work. Both those just starting to use Photoshop and those with more experience found this a useful and interesting talk. Jo’s style of presentation is very clear and easy to understand and this was an excellent evening. If you would like to find out more about Jo and her work her website address is:

https://BAMimages.net.

Julie Walker

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On January 17th Keswick Photographic Society heard an excellent presentation from farmer, mother and professional photographer Amy Bateman, author of the extremely well received book: “Forty Farms”. This, Lakeland Book of the Year, contains descriptions of forty widely disparate farms across the breadth of Cumbria, with interviews with the farmers concerned and illustrated with Amy’s excellent photographs.

What was a dauntingly large task in itself to complete, has continued as Amy travels around giving talks and presentations as a follow up and all of which provides an essential supplement to the income her family receives from their own farming enterprise.

The bulk of her talk consisted of short descriptions of over half of the farms featured in her book with anecdotes about her visits, including meeting intractable bulls, an Ostrich(!), and a donkey that lived with a herd of bulls and kept them under total control. (She was advised not to worry about the bulls, they were all subservient and docile, but not to approach the donkey!). Many of the farms were introducing conservation measures to both increase the natural biodiversity and regenerate the soil but she included a large highly genetically driven cow breeding operation, a sheep-milking business that made its own wonderful cheese, an egg-producer that combined very natural woodland based free-range living with high tech egg checking and packing facilities, and even the farm attached to the three Michelin star, L’Enclume, in Cartmel, which produces all of the restaurant’s vegetables and herbs and where Amy tried her hand at flying her photography drone through the poly tunnels, with not totally successful results.

Amy has won a number of photographic awards, none more prestigious than being the winner of British Photographer of the Year with an atmospheric self portrait of her hand feeding a newborn lamb in the middle of the night.

She also delivers workshops to other photographers teaching them about techniques to record farming life and giving them privileged access to parts of farms normally out of bounds.

The audience that had dared to come out into the sub-zero temperatures were thoroughly entertained, educated and inspired in equal measure and could only agree with the quote that Amy put up at the end of her talk from the great photographer Don McCullin, “Photography for me is not looking, it’s feeling. If you can’t feel what you’re looking at, then you’re never going to get others to feel anything when they look at your pictures.” Amy had evidently succeeded in this aspiration.