Current and past 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.
We enjoyed the current Challenge images which are;
#48 TONDO
#49 CHEER UP!
… and the latest Challenge;
#50 PRIMARY COLOURS
Here, the guidance was to create an image which predominantly features one or more bold saturated colours. Ideally these will be strong graphical compositions using the primary colours red, yellow and blue. Sunglasses were needed for the resulting 70+ images which blew us away on the big screen. It was a refreshing change as we usually avoid strong colours in most club images for competition purposes.
Bob spoke positively about the iColorama app (iOS free + in app purchases) Which is incredibly creative and capable of hundreds of effects. However it has a steep learning curve. Several members continued to make good use of the Tiny Planets app for iOS (99p + 99p for essential extras)
The next Challenge will be;
#51 INSPIRED BY PAUL KENNY
Paul Kenny is a highly regarded abstract and conceptual British photographer based in Newcastle upon Tyne. He has had great success and many exhibitions with images demonstrating his particular vision. Most of his work consists of beautifully intricate macro images of corroded and distressed materials or arrangements of vegetation and flowers. Beachcoming/mudlarking produces many of his materials, often combined with evaporated salt water. A comprehensive gallery of his work can be seen at Paul Kenny Photographic Works https://paul-kenny.co.uk and elsewhere on the web.
Many of his images are created using a flatbed scanner, often with a dish of liquid such as brine on the glass. The lid is left open to create a black background. His scanning methodology need not necessarily be followed (a camera could be employed effectively) but I do think that we should adopt his aesthetic and the principle of adding nothing new to the image in Photoshop beyond subtle shifts of contrast and saturation. Furthermore his restriction to mineral and vegetable subjects should be maintained.
Quotes regarding Paul include…
For more than 35 years Paul has sought “the awe-inspiring in that which is easily passed by. It contains issues of fragility, beauty and transience in the landscape: marks and scars left by man and the potential threat to the few remaining areas of wilderness. Looking at the micro and thinking about the macro, I aim for each print to be a beautiful, irresistible, thought provoking object.”
Paul creates plates of his found items, scans and then creates large scale photographs with them. He has also used seawater from the beaches where he took images to erode and change their appearance
He says, “I suppose if the main challenge I set myself is to make increasingly beautiful work, the simpler the image the better, the more ideas the better, so the other variable is to make those images out of more and more insignificant material: a splash of dried seawater, a rusting can bottom, a handful of sand, a battered plastic bottle”.
Kenny’s work is contemplative and openly embraces beauty and mystery. It’s poetic—stripped to bare bones at times, or sometimes loaded with an unimaginable quantity of visual information. His eye is on the cast-off and lowly things of the world, while his mind is on greater issues. However it’s described, the payoff for the viewer is profound: In his pictures, wonder takes its place with shape, value, and texture as an essential formal element.
His recording tool of choice has lately become the film scanner. By removing the cover from the scanning bed, he was able to scan three-dimensional objects, a method which makes the background dark and the borders of the piece black. After some research, he learned that a scanner’s optimum point of focus is slightly above the bed itself, and this gave him the idea of elevating the layer to be recorded using Petrie dishes. New work could be created in the dishes or on glass plates covered or surrounded by fluid. The entire scanner bed could be turned into a reservoir by calking the edge of the glass with silicon gel. One or several flashlights could be used to illuminate aspects of a subject from above or the side during scanning. Kenny insists that nothing in the new work is created in Photoshop, and that the scans are not enhanced beyond subtle shifts in contrast or color saturation. All of the color comes from the natural materials employed. Despite these shifts away from the historic photographic process, he is adamant that the new work is truly photography: the record of light passing through a matrix and recorded on a paper surface.
BACK OF BEYOND DIARIES
Windows 11. The fresh install of my desktop PC is running daily and is mostly complete. Unfortunately, I am still getting Blue Screens of Death followed by reboots into BIOS about once a month but with different reason codes from before.
However, the main surprise is how very slow my 4 year old high performance gaming specification PC has become with Windows 11. Start up and shut down take much longer than before. My previous favoured browser Firefox is so slow it is unusable and Photoshop takes 3 or 4 seconds to do things that were previously instantaneous. Online reports for Windows 11 are mixed. Many have my experience, others do not. Whilst I investigate, I have switched to the Microsoft Edge browser which (surprise, surprise) is OK. I won’t be rushing to ‘upgrade’ our other two PCs. Although support is supposed to end in October, with 60% of PCs still running Windows 10, there are strong rumours that Microsoft will continue support beyond this date.
Photoshop Stability. Whilst having a winge about Windows I will repeat my dissatisfaction with Photoshop. Despite raking in millions of dollars from subscriptions, long-standing bugs remain and key features such as the 30-year-old filters continue to be ignored. A common weakness is the vulnerability of Photoshop to graphics card/driver incompatibilities. I have this at the moment and symptoms are regular crashes or freezes and problems with cursors and screen re-drawing. An easy diagnostic move is Edit>Preferences>Performance>Use Graphics Processor>untick. After re-starting Photoshop, the crashes and freezes may cease. There is a very long list of debugging measures from Adobe to try here.
Another area of weakness is the Photoshop Preferences file which can become corrupted. If you phone the Adobe support line (in Ireland) the first thing they will ask you to do is delete this file. Rather than fix this weakness Adobe have just put a Reset Preferences On Quit button at Preferences>General, which may fix the problem but ignores the fact that power users will then have to reset many aspects of their installation.
It’s hard to recommend Photoshop to new users. Apart from the creaking software, Adobe-sourced help information has always been poor at best and the application itself is old-fashioned – a huge box of tricks that can do everything but there's no apparent process to do anything. I continue to use Photoshop because I have a 30 years of muscle memory, but I would recommend newcomers give Affinity Photo a try based on price and feedback from users.
NEXT MEETING
The next meeting is on Thursday 3rd April 2025 in the LARGE BARN HALL at the Community Centre.
Cheers, Steve.