This week's camera club meeting was hosted by our very own Gerry Coe and Hugh Rooney .
Hugh put a collection of approximately 100 photos together that he had found online from photographers from various sites such as Instagram and Zoom talks. The photos mainly featured subjects that Hugh finds particularly interesting, such as Architecture and landscapes, but he also included a few wildlife and portrait photos into his talk.
Hugh gets his inspiration from other black and white photographers in particular, and tries to incorporate different techniques into his own work. Techniques such as adding light to give depth to the buildings, which leaves a striking impression of what most people see as “just a building”. Hugh included landscapes, trees with soft misty backgrounds, portraits, street photography and wildlife images from a number of photographers all beautifully captured in black and white. The photos in Hugh’s talk where from all around the world and made for a very interesting presentation and showed us that black and white photos can vary from strong and definite black and white to soft and mystical black and white images. Every one of them a masterpiece.
Hugh also showed us some stunning colour woodland images with the sun rays coming through the trees which came across as very calming and peaceful and would look great on any living room wall.
Hugh finished his talk with a poignant time lapse video about the construction of the new Trade Centre building over the past 20yrs. The making of the video included setting up 100 view points and a staggering 13.3 million photographs, all compressed down into 6 mins of film. This can be found on YouTube and is entitled “Official 20 Year Timelapse-Rebuilding the world trade center” by EarthCam.
In the second half of the evening Gerry presented his talk named “Influences 2” Gerry started by telling us that Everything and Everyone influences him, which is a great mindset. He has had many early influences in his photography journey. He always had a fascination with art but realized he didn’t have that specific talent, so he ended up as a photographer. Gerry’s father was good at Art and he fondly shared that he has some of his pictures framed and hanging in his house. Impressionist artists, such as Renoir and Monet, are a big influence to him because of their style of paintings. He showed us some of his early photos and how he transformed them into a type of “painterly” look. This kind of image manipulation can take many processes, until he is happy with the final result. He has recently revisited old photos he had taken in the past and sometimes processing the image in as many as 4-5 editing apps. However, one type of app would only produce a tiny file and not suitable for enlarging for a large print, but the result was still satisfying to him. In contradiction to the limits of one app, he has been able to enlarge photos to a print of 3ft by 2ft with others.
Gerry mentioned Street Photography and explained that when he takes a photo of people in the street, he imagines what kind of story is behind the photo. He describes himself as a “Frustrated Artist”, because he can’t paint or draw, he tries to do it through his computer with photos. Gerry loved working with colours and tones in his early work. Although he is a great black and white Photographer when he brings colour into his work, he loves strong bright colours. He enjoys trying to recreate similar images to those artists' painting that inspire him. He mentioned a technique called “Joiners” by David Hackney, which are individual photos of different parts of a building, for example, and all joined together to get a complete picture, (sort of similar to a jigsaw with photos). Gerry finished his talk with a selection of his black and white photos and his interpretation of Impressionism photos.
On behalf of the club, I’d like to thank both Hugh and Gerry for their inspirational talks and to know that through their influences they are, in turn, inspiring and influential to others.
For the second year the annual dinner where the exhibition trophies and awards are normally presented did not happen due to ongoing Covid restrictions. This has always been a showcase event which is sadly missed by members of the club.
So it was that last Saturday the club President Gerry Coe arranged for the those who were overdue to receive their silverware and certificates to meet outside the club's premises for a group photo in honor of the winners of the exhibition competition.
These and all of the excellent exhibition entries for colour and mono print and digital projection can be viewed at https://www.bangor-camera-club.co.uk