This first meeting of the new season immediately followed the very successful annual exhibition and so we welcomed several new members to the group.
Although many of the Challenges can be done entirely in-camera, most of us use an image editor to enhance our images. Adobe Photoshop CS is the most popular simply because of it’s 30-year market dominance but it is very expensive. Beginners could equally choose Photoshop Elements which doesn’t require a subscription and is in no-way a compromise. Furthermore it has much more help and guidance. A newer entrant to the market is Affinity Photo which is the first serious competitor and increasingly popular with our members. Both have lots of helpful tutorials online – especially Affinity Photo. All of these products benefit from periodic sales when 30 to 50% reductions can be found (on Amazon for Adobe).
NB Chris S recommends highly creative tutorials for Affinity Photo from Michael Wilson and also Lamrensi especially with reference to the latest Surreal Challenge.
Drop me an email if you have questions about the technology or digital photography generally.
MONTHLY CHALLENGES
All our Challenge images can be seen at Amersham Beyond Group on Flickr.
For APS Members only, the images are also available for viewing and commenting on Facebook here.
The current Challenges are;
#37 OUT OF BOUNDS
#38 FILM GRAIN
… and the latest Challenge,
#39 CHALLENGE YOURSELF
This summer Challenge gave everyone free rein to have a go at something they’d always wanted to try but never found time for.
We had an excellent response with 17 members participating this month and more to come. Many of these are self-explanatory but a few revealed information worth including here;
Jacqui T and Tracy B returned to the subject of flowers frozen in ice. As a reminder – use de-ionised water and maybe suspend the flowers upside down to reduce bubbles obscuring the flowers. A small LED torch shining through the ice offers total control over the lighting.
Peter L embarked upon portraiture and was inspired by a YouTube video from Canon called The Decoy where photographers were briefed that the subject had very different back-stories and how this affected their portraits.
Alison T explored flowers through water and oil and was inspired by the work of Maja Strgar Kurecic
I spoke about my experiments with infra-red having borrowed the club’s compact IR camera and then had a spare camera body converted by Protech Photographic. Much experimentation at every stage is required not-least with lenses as many exhibit unfavourable and unpredictable results with IR.
Myra experimented with garden subjects during a Covid isolation and utilised Topaz Labs filters for background texture effects.
Martin’s images might not be self-explanatory as he was experimenting with a home-made texture and then playing with images in which perspective had been removed eg a wide image assembled from several shots each taken from directly in front.
Diane S experimented in Venice with an interesting iPhone app called Average Camera Pro (iOS £1.99) which can combine multiple exposures on-screen in real-time. Although it has not been updated for several years it seems to work well at full resolution but with the main camera only.
Chris S enjoyed hanging out in Venice at a spot where Instagrammers were queuing to be photographed – providing endless beautifully posed and dressed models.
Juliet joined a long line of members inspired by our speaker of several years ago; Polina Plotnikova and her ‘dancing flowers’.
Nigel L experimented with simulating Solarisation – a technique from film days. He found two tutorials with very different approaches to achieving this; Justin Odisho and Michael Brig.
Maggie wanted to create a moving illustration. She made the component images for the movement in Photoshop and then animated them using the Timeline feature, outputting the result as a video file. I wondered if an audio visual program such as the venerable PicturesToExe would be more flexible and with numerous output formats.
The next Challenge is;
#40 SURREALISM
Surreal is defined as oddly dreamlike or unreal. You might take inspiration from the Surrealist Movement of the 20th C or follow your own dreams. The image could be created by post-processing or made in-camera.
An online image search for surrealism offers thousands of ideas. We started with Dora Maar who was a partner and muse of Picasso and produced many surreal photographs in the 1930’s
NEXT MEETING
The next meeting will be on Thursday 2nd November and will be in the LARGE BARN HALL -across the car park from our usual venue.
BACK OF BEYOND – DIARIES
Phone Cameras. The convenience of the camera(s) in your pocket at all times cannot be argued. Often with up to three focal lengths and an array of creative apps to inspire and create innovative images, I am increasingly relying on my iPhone 14 for all everyday photography. But am I compromising quality for convenience?
As an experiment I made an A2 print from the main camera at 12Mpx using a well-lit image. It was slightly cropped and slightly sharpened and the results were impressive. At more than twice the size of a competition print I felt that it could hold it’s own against a compact camera, at least and I will continue to use it for print and projected competitions. The reservations that I had were to do with edge-effects and I will experiment with more or less sharpening in future and also try up-scaling the image using the new Super Resolution feature in Photoshop. In fact the main camera is actually 48Mpx native resolution and can be saved as an Adobe Raw image. My initial experiments with this did certainly show more detail but at the price of file size and the Adobe Raw did not offer much of the highlight and shadow recovery that a ’proper’ raw file would allow. I do not plan to use this capability unless I am presented with an unmissable photographic opportunity and I only have the phone with me.
Cheers, Steve