Tabletop/Still Life Results Night

March 23rd, 2021 -27 Attendees

Week 12

On Tuesday 2nd March we had an interesting and inspiring demonstration by David Gibbs of Tabletop Photography. David showed us in detail the process used to take three images, one using Smoke Trails, one using Light trails to form a type of Spirograph figure, and one using a very lovely image of an apple spattered with water drops. The Camera Club were set the challenge to try Tabletop photography, something that has been especially useful during lockdown.

Seventeen members rose to the challenge entering forty-four images for critique.

The club has invited Rojer Weightman from Stoke Poges club to give the critique.

The images were varied, many were taken from the monthly challenge (Friday Evenings set by Chenxi) of photographing glass. Wine glasses were displayed in many ways, using ideas that came out of discussions such as different backdrops, half- filled glasses, stacked glasses, and reflected glasses.

Some abstracts were shown using smoke trails, folded paper, John had used a stepladder with one sec shutter speed to capture a pattern he had made using soap on his worksurface. Rojer was impressed with Barry’s paper abstract, and John’s work surface patterns. Peter had an impressive abstract showing a Romanesque (cauliflower like vegetable) which Rojer thought showed a great texture.

Mike Ward showed us a very nice red apple image, and a Strawberry image which during his critique Rojer pointed out, had a large bruise. Mike said, “That’s because I dropped it.”This caused much amusement to club members. There were several lighthearted moments as members described the lengths, they went to, to get their shots.

Not least Chenxi’s wonderful picture of vegetables being tossed in a frying pan. When asked how he had achieved this, he explained he had used equipment that used a laser beam to set off the camera when the beam was broken, whilst he tossed the vegetables in the pan.

David had tried focus stacking with his vase of flowers image and another image of a kitchen sieve lit with a red light to achieve total sharpness. Laurence had thoughts of Easter with his bottle of gin and chocolate Easter egg.

Julia had used some beautiful bottles in her image, and she had achieved a drawn effect which gave great texture to the image. Nick and Sherrin tried equipment they had not used before, a soft box, and presented nice images of a ring reflected ,(Sherrin) pencils, and a computer mouse reflected.(Nick).Sarah presented a lovely vase of flowers and Chris a bright yellow model car, as well as a light trail image.

This challenge made members excel with imaginative ideas and pushed them to experiment with new ideas and equipment. Rojer gave good advice on how to correct small mistakes and suggestions on camera settings and improvements. The evening was a success.

Gavin Hoey’s website was mentioned a lot and his Youtube presentations.