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Our speaker at the latest meeting of Keswick Photographic Society did not have far to travel, nor did he require much introduction. Dr Keith Snell LRPS MPSA EFIAP is a longstanding member and a past Chairman of the club. His topic was ‘In-Camera Creative Photography’, specifically the techniques of intentional camera movement (known as ICM) and multiple exposure photography. As Keith pointed out, both of these techniques are possible to simulate with computer software such as Photoshop, but his preference was to achieve the effects in the field and using the settings available in the camera. He felt that this was a more intimately engaging experience as he could modify the camera settings in response to the landscape environment and conditions at the time of taking the images. The intention in his talk was very much a ‘how to’ description of techniques, together with examples of the kind of effects that could be created by their application.

 

In the first half Keith discussed intentional camera movement which requires that the camera settings should be adjusted to achieve a slow shutter speed, anywhere between 1/10 second and many seconds. While the shutter is open, various movements of the camera by the photographer will blur certain areas of the image, often producing an impressionistic effect or even an abstract image where patterns would predominate over representation of the subject. He emphasised that there were no rigid rules but he described a range of movements and illustrated in his images the effects that they produced. A striking image of the night-time lights of Funchal in Madeira was produced by rotating the camera around a fixed point and a circular movement, which tracked the tumbling waves of a stormy sea at Maryport, invoked something of William Turner’s impressionist painting style.

After the break, Keith moved on to the multiple exposure technique where each image is superimposed upon the preceding one; in the time of film cameras this often happened when inadvertently forgetting to wind the film on between exposures! With digital cameras it can be achieved in a controlled way, visualising the emerging composition in the viewfinder or on the back screen of the camera. Between exposures it is possible to change some of the camera settings and Keith described the effect of using different modes of blending of the exposures on the final image. He also showed the striking effects of changing the white balance setting in the camera between exposures. Most photographers use the camera’s automatic white balance setting which adjusts the colour cast to compensate for the different ambient colour temperature of a sunny scene or a cloudy scene for example. But one can set the colour temperature manually and create unnatural colour casts on the separate exposures which, when blended, produce striking abstract images. One of Keith’s examples was the interior of the Oculus building at Ground Zero in New York.

Keith also described the effects achievable by keeping a subject in close register during a series of exposures, producing an impressionist style of image. The other approach is to ‘sample’ different elements of a scene, or even different scenes, in separate exposures and blend these together. After showing many examples of the variety of final effects one can achieve with multi-exposure photography, he finished his presentation by describing what is possible with mobile phone cameras and showed an example of a multiple exposure scene at the Manchester International Festival this summer taken with his iPhone.

Altogether, this was an intriguing talk exploring some creative approaches to photography which were new to many of the members. With Keith’s revelations of the techniques needed, it is possible that many members will be tempted into the ‘dark arts’ of trying them out. They were certainly inspired by the variety of images on display and showed their appreciation for a thought-provoking talk with enthusiastic applauses.

There is an opportunity to view the photographs of our members at our Annual Photographic Exhibition at Keswick’s Theatre by the Lake from 12 October to 11 November.

On 27th September Keswick Photographic Society were pleased to welcome as their guest speaker, Kathryn Scorah MPAGB EFIAP FBPE, who had driven up from her home near Southport to deliver her talk ‘Ever Changing Perspectives’. Although it was a projected image presentation, we were delighted to see that Kathryn had also brought along print versions of her images which revealed the full quality of her work, including a striking print of tree trunks where the textures seemed convincingly three-dimensional. Many of the members had to touch it to convince themselves that it wasn’t printed on textured art paper!

Kathryn explained that the primary motivation in her photography is an emphasis on depicting mood or relating a story to engage the viewer. In order to take her images to the next level from the moment of capture, Kathryn makes extensive use of post-processing manipulation in the computer. This could selectively enhance areas of contrast or brightness in the image to focus the viewer’s attention and evoke an emotional response. An isolated boat adrift in a calm sea or a stormy wave bearing down on a lighthouse were both images which benefitted from this treatment. And she showed many before-and-after examples of how her post-processing skills could transform an initially mundane image into one with striking emotional impact.

Many of her photographs were composite images in which she seamlessly combined elements from separate images to produce a newly-created picture which conveyed a scene born out of her own imagination. Again, the goal being to tell a story or create a mood for the viewer to engage with. A beautiful girl with her lambs in a snowy winter scene and an isolated church next to a stream out on the mountain side were examples of her imagination at work to produce creative images with impact.

In finding appropriate people to populate some of her composite compositions, Kathryn travels widely to photograph the actors at the Edinburgh Fringe street shows, the Goths who appear every year at Whitby Abbey, the World War veterans at Pickering or the peripatetic Ragged Victorians. There is much skill in evidence in ensuring that wherever these subjects might then appear in her composite photographs, all elements of the scene are carefully and convincingly  combined with due consideration to matching their tones and colours.

Members were in awe of the skill and imagination which Kathryn brought to her creative photography and registered their approval with enthusiastic applause at the end.

Keith Snell

This week’s meeting was a step away from the normal lecture, presentation or judging session of members’ photographs. Instead it was a novel approach which involved the participation of all members and visitors.  The evening was led by our member, David Price EFIAP MPSA DPAGB.

“Shard and Squares” by David Carine

The aim of the evening was to give all members the opportunity to critique images in a non-competitive environment and in so doing improve their appreciation both of the images and of the role of judges.  The potential for significantly differing opinions of an image would highlight the difficulty judges experience in scoring or ranking images.

“Lone Man in the Landscape” by Marta Almar

Members had been invited to submit up to six digital images prior to the evening’s meeting and David collated and anonymised them.  Members had been invited to bring their own laptops to the meeting and the selection of images were uploaded onto 7 laptops.  The 21 members present were divided into groups of three and invited to discuss the technical, compositional and storytelling merits of the images.

“Tuatara” by Philip Cartwright

They could make suggestions for improvement if appropriate and so on.  There was no requirement to reach a consensus nor to report on their deliberations.  It was simply an interactive experience of assessing images and it worked incredibly well!

“Redwood Glade” by Richard Jakobson

Everyone present immersed themselves in the exercise and it was apparent that there was opportunity for everyone to have their say. The success of the evening could be judged by the fact that everyone was still busily critiquing images when the time for the meeting to close had been reached.  David Price was thanked for introducing this event and I feel sure that the concept will be repeated in future programmes.

David Woodthorpe

For the second meeting of the new season we had a presentation from Tim Fisher, the proprietor of the Northern Lights Gallery in Keswick. Prior to this Tim ran a photographic business in the south of the country as well as working for national newspapers. He has continued an active interest in photography since his move to Cumbria, now concentrating on landscapes and portraiture. This has resulted in several national and international awards.

Tim’s presentation was a new departure for the society in that we were taken through the process of selecting images from a portfolio with the intention of presenting them for competition. The first set of images were composites of local landscapes.

They were composed by combining monochrome photographs taken from a window in his gallery in Keswick together with photographs of coloured paintings by one of the artists exhibiting in the gallery.

As this project developed and he crafted the combined images, Tim began to use a theme derived from Ruskin’s view that the effects of the industrial revolution were poisoning the Lake District. We were shown 45 images and in two rounds reduced that down to only 10 which we felt were the best representation of this theme.

I might add that this was not done by a validated electoral process but by the subjective weighting of the “ayes” and “nos” heard in the room and from our Zoom participants! Tim discussed with us the criteria he uses when selecting images and suggested one of the best methods when selecting is to project the images onto a screen if possible.

After the break Tim then showed a selection of images of mainly children, taken at Appleby Horse Fair in 2017. A change in the weather conditions that year was instrumental in forming the basis of these images ie The Appleby Mud Portraits.

It became clear that the thick, ubiquitous mud was a major player in most of these images. Tim described how the children were willing participants in the project but that the logistical difficulties in obtaining the necessary permissions from parents/guardians were significant.

He also described how the ”punchy” appearance of these photographs was obtained by using a flash to isolate the subjects, but used from low down, so as not to create shadow on their faces.

This was a fascinating insight into how a professional photographer goes about developing a concept, working with it and producing a final portfolio of images.

Richard Jakobson

The Edinburgh International Print Exhibition is an extremely prestigious competition founded in 1861. It is judged prior to the Edinburgh Festival and the winning images exhibited during the Festival.

The percentage of submitted images which are accepted for the exhibition is vanishingly small. It is indeed remarkable and possibly unique that our wife and husband team, Julie and Alan Walker each achieved a Gold Medal in the exhibition this year.

Julie for ‘Bison Foraging in the Snow’ which won the PSA Gold Medal

and Alan for ‘He loves me, He loves me not’ which won the GPU Gold Medal

Many, many congratulations to both who are seen below receiving their medals from the chair of the exhibition

 

This is the first of a series of posts celebrating our club and members’ successes in various national and international competitions over the past 12 months. The Nothern Counties Photographic Federation Annual Competition is the main competitive event organised by the Federation for clubs across the North East of England and Cumbria. Twenty nine clubs entered the 2023 Annual Competition. Keswick PS and its members were successful in a number of the categories:

We won the Corder Trophy for the best club entry of Monochrome Prints.            We were second in the Bewick Trophy for the best club entry of Colour Prints.   We won the Myles Audas Memorial Trophy for the best club entry of Projected Digital Images.

Individual awards for members were ‘Storm Over The Mountain Cabins’ by Alan Walker which won overall best photograph in all sections and best colour print:

‘Bison Foraging In The Snow’ by Julie Walker which won Best Nature Print

 

 

‘Taking in the Sea Air’ by Julie Walker which won Best Creative Print

 

‘Disapproval’ by Alan Walker which won Best Human Portrait Mono Print

 

‘Beaten’ by Bob Given which was the Best Sport PDI Image

 

and ‘The Modest Smile’ by Alan Walker which was the Best Human Portrait

 

This week’s meeting of the photographic society was part one of the Portfolio of the Year competition.  This year, because of the large number of submissions, the judging will be  taking place over two meetings with the first being the judging of projected digital images (PDIs) and the second meeting, on 12^th April, for prints.

Our judge this week was Dave Best LRPS a long-standing committee member of Hexham and District Photographic Society and a judge of some experience.  He acknowledged that the collection of 72 images were of a high standard and as the evening unfolded those present would concur with that.

The Portfolio of the Year competition allows competitors to submit up to four PDIs but with a restriction that each image must be of a different genre.  The genres include for example, Nature, Creative, Landscape, Mono, Portrait, Sport, Photo-journalism etc.  This is challenging for our members, several of whom specialise in perhaps one or two genres. It is quite revealing to discover that accomplished Nature or Landscape photographers are often very good in other fields of photography.

The winner of the competition, which is determined by the combined score of all the entries, was Alan Walker whose submission included a portrait of a ‘down and out’ sitting against a graffitied wall in Belfast (who was actually a very good actor/photographer/model and a member of our club!).  It was called Just a Statistic. Other images of Fighting Sea Eagles, a dramatic landscape entitled Storm over the Dolomites and a top scoring sport image of a head-on shot of a long jumper completed the winning submission.

 

The ‘down and out’ was actually Bob Given, who was second equal in the competition with Ade Gidney. Bob’s monochrome and quite dramatic image of three women posing as ‘The Management’ was the overall best image of the night.

 

Ade Gidney’s images included a beautiful view of mist over White Moss

 

The best natural history image was a superb pin-sharp and very colourful portrait of a Golden-fronted Woodpecker by Ronnie Gilbert.

 

Jo Knight, who specialises in very artistic and creative images submitted the winning Still Life image called Gravity.  It was of a bowl of apples with an apple in mid-air, apparently falling into it.

 

Julie Walker’s studio portrait, Holly in Green was of a well known red haired model wearing a very ornate green dress. The very detailed image with perfectly captured and portrayed skin tones won the best Portrait of the competition.

 

David Woodthorpe

On Wednesday 22nd March we had a wonderful presentation given by award winning photographer Tim Pile. Tim is a member of Smethwick Photographic Society. His specialism is in fine art images of women taken in the open air. His aim in his own words is to “capture the beauty of the female form in the manmade and natural environment”. A unique characteristic of his work is that his model usually only occupies a very small part of the overall image thus emphasising the grandeur of the backdrop.

 

Tim started the evening by talking about his photographic journey which began in 2008. He said that at that point in his life he was too shy to take photographs of people. However, this changed as his confidence grew as his photography developed. In the early days he experimented with different types of photography including infrared. He quickly moved on to taking portraits of women and developed his own style through contrasting the curves of the female body with the geometrical lines of the manmade world.

 

In pursuit of this Tim has taken images in some seemingly unpromising places. These include derelict buildings, empty office blocks, a derelict railway station, a disused swimming pool, an old nightclub, and an abandoned hydro-electric power station. He very rarely takes studio images and even then he prefers to use natural light.

 

The second half of Tim’s talk was dedicated to his collaboration with a particular model whom he met in 2014. Their partnership has led him to photograph outdoors in many different locations both in the UK and abroad. Their travels have taken them to Scotland, Ireland, Portugal, Norway, Iceland, Italy, Corsica and France amongst others. Some of his favourite settings include moss covered rocks, coastal scenery, woodlands, volcanic lava fields and waterfalls. He carries out extensive research before settling on a particular location and most shoots involve a very early morning start. His priority is always for the wellbeing and safety of the model. In cold locations his model is only required to pose for a few minutes before warming up.

 

A particular aspect of Tim’s photography is the unusual angles that he sometimes photographs from. Many of his most striking images are taken from above. He experimented with different angles from the outset of his photographic journey. Attention to detail is also paramount and he will often spend half an hour or more setting up a shot before taking a single image.

 

Tim illustrated his talk with a huge number of superb prints including those that made up his successful Royal Photographic Society Associate and Irish Photographic Federation Fellowship panels. It was a master class in fine art photography and a fascinating and most enjoyable evening.

Julie Walker

Keswick Photography Society were entertained and educated in equal measure by a presentation from Sports and Music photographer Michael Berkeley, delivered via Zoom from his home in Wiltshire. Michael is highly experienced, having photographed more than three hundred musical acts and over four hundred sporting events, covering thirty different sports. Although sports and music might seem to be entirely different, he outlined the similarities of having an unpredictable moving subject, (especially at the more lively rock gigs), with lighting conditions outside the photographer’s control and usually very low in indoor events, and variable weather, sometimes cold and wet, sometimes hot and steamy.

 

The challenge is then to capture the decisive moment; the football bulging the net, the cricket ball and bails still in the air or the guitarist in mid leap, to isolate the point of interest by choosing to shoot from a position with as uncluttered background as possible and, hopefully, to tell a story. A striker wheeling away in triumph followed by his joyful teammates, perhaps with one or two despondent defenders in the frame is likely to be more powerful than an image showing him actually kicking the ball when scoring.

 

Key tips in sport included getting down low which increases the sensation of being in the middle of the drama, although an exception might be that in cricket a higher position can allow for the cleaner background of the grassy outfield as opposed to the sparsely occupied seating in the stands. It is important to be highly familiar with the camera and its functions so that changes to settings can be made rapidly and without missing the action, but not to be obsessed with technical perfection as a slightly out of focus shot that dramatically tells the story will be better than a perfectly sharp one that does not.

 

Generally, Michael shoots with a narrow depth of field, as this helps blur distracting backgrounds and he will take lots of images, rejecting up to 95% in order to get the ones that are most successful. Digital cameras with high-speed motor drives make this straightforward, but in musical settings, especially in quiet classical pieces, having a silent mode on the camera is also essential. Michael uses Sony mirrorless cameras that can be set to make no noise at all when shooting.

 

All of this advice was accompanied by numerous images of football, cricket, basketball, motor racing, speedway, rock bands both in dark sweaty venues and at a festival in the open air and concerts given by the Salisbury Cathedral School pupils, some in the Cathedral itself. Refreshingly, he showed a number of images that he did not feel had really “worked”, and explained in each case why and what could be done differently. An example was of photographing Speedway, a high-speed sport if ever there was one, where too high a shutter speed resulted in sharp spokes on the wheels which resulted in looking rather static and failed to convey the same feeling of speed that blurred ones would. Another was the simple trick of strange colour casts caused by the lights in an indoor music event being negated by the simple expedient of converting the image to black and white.

 

All in all, a highly informative evening.

Tony Marsh

Our speaker on 1^st March was David Poole from Milnthorpe in the South Lakes. David is a dedicated and enthusiastic wildlife photographer. His talk was titled “The Wildlife of Morecambe Bay” and he took us on a grand tour of the nature reserves surrounding the bay of which there are more than thirty.

David started in the north at Hay Bridge where, amongst others, there are Ospreys, Adders, deer and dragonflies. From there he took us to Witherslack for butterflies. His next stop was Foulshaw Moss where he has been photographing wildlife for more than twelve years. He said that this reserve is particularly good for butterflies, dragon flies, moths, beetles and damsel flies and many other species of wildlife.

He arrives there early in the morning to have the best chance of finding, and photographing, his subjects. He then took us to the Lythe Valley where there is a site that is known for its Fritillary Butterflies including the rare High Brown which is Britain’s most threatened butterfly. Next came images of the Beautiful Demoiselle, a species which can be found on the river Gilpin. Then on to Hawfinches which he had photographed at Sizergh Castle where they are attracted to the Hornbeam trees. He then showed some photographs of Dippers taken on the River Kent. These included some of a Dipper feeding its chick.

 

David has his own hide and from this he has photographed a huge range of birds. He uses a mirrorless camera as this makes no sound and thus does not scare the more nervous birds, such as Buzzards, away.

 

After the break David took us to Arnside Knott and then on to Leighton Moss. He has been visiting the latter at least once a week for many years and in 2008 he produced a book “A Year at Leighton Moss”. As well as photographing numerous species of birds here he has also photographed Otters and Red Deer. From here he took us further south to the Great Barrows Nature Reserve at Arnside, the River Keer at Carnforth and the Middleton Nature Reserve at Heysham.

 

David’s beautiful photographs of a huge number of species were interspersed with numerous amusing anecdotes relating to his experiences whilst out taking photographs. We also learned about the behaviour of the various species he photographed. Altogether it was a wonderful evening.

Julie Walker