There was a reduced but enthusiastic turnout for the members’ presentation of their abstract images – Covid19 may be taking its toll on group meetings.
I gave a talk to the club a few weeks ago on my version of ‘Abstract’, setting the challenge to head out into the wild and try some of the techniques. Twelve members had taken up the challenge. Showing their images and talking about why and how they had achieved these. We all found our technical vocabulary increasing with phrases such as ‘messing about’, ‘fiddling around’, ‘wobbly effect’ and ‘faffing’ – a few acknowledged ‘happy accidents’ leading to the end results with one member admitting his image was achieved by ‘falling over’ – an interesting variation of ICM but possibly best avoided. Quite a few experimented with zooming in and out, blending, double images, varying depth of field and isolating a part of something to remove its context. Ferrofluid produced intriguing images (messy and a bit dangerous) and the Pep Ventosa technique was used by one member – his version was changing the position of the lighting and focus points and is now known as the ‘Jones Technique’!
It was amazing to see such an incredible variety of interesting images and hear all the knowledge gained whilst having fun at the same time (maybe not the falling over bit). It was a very interactive evening and I thoroughly enjoyed it. We all now have a list of new things to try, new software filters to discover and new ways to use our cameras.
Kathy
