Tag Archives: Lancaster Photographic Society

Photography, Teaching

A mad weekend of street photography, caves, and talking to an audience

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Last weekend was hectic. Super hectic. Most of it was planned at the last minute, too. Saturday was night time street photography in Manchester, Sunday was a trip to the Lake District.

The scheduled part of this was Monday evening. For several months, I’ve known I was to give a practical demonstration on flash portraits to Lancaster Photographic Society. The plan was for two of us to do it. But the other guy stepped out at the last minute, so I had to do the whole thing solo.

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3D, Blender

Delving back into 3D

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It’s been almost a decade since I last ventured into the world of 3D software like Maya, 3DS Max, etc. but suddenly I seem to have been bitten by the bug again.

It all started a few weeks ago when I was asked to give another talk at Lancaster Photographic Society on lighting portraits.

My plan was to sift through the images I already have in my library, and shoot a few more to explain specific lighting principles, and the differences that can happen when you add or take away a light here, or a reflector there.

Then, I stumbled across a post in the Strobist group on Facebook by Pat David, linking to a fantastic Blender 3D file he put together on his website, created specifically for the purposes of rendering out lighting tests – you can see one of mine in the header photo on this post. Continue reading Delving back into 3D →

Photography

LPS Annual Projected Image Competition 2014

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So we recently held Lancaster Photographic Society‘s Annual Projected Image Competition, judged by Tillman Kleinhans.

Congratulations to Ruth and Allan for getting colour and mono Image of the Year, respectively.

My images are shown at 8:18, 15:46, 24:20 and 29:14, and linked below the video.

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General

Work Hard or Work Smart?

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This post is the consequence of a conversation I had yesterday evening with my sister, chatting to her about the upcoming South Lakes Interclub Photography Competition, and how the whole thing works.

But it is also kind of the point I was attempting to make on my previous post about fixing things in Photoshop that you could’ve resolved at the time of shooting (well, one of the points I was trying to make).

In previous years, we’d remained at the venue (as a competing team, not as host) until at least 11pm usually (once past midnight – after which we had to make an hour and a half drive back home) due to waiting for technological hiccups to be overcome so that we could continue, but last year was different.

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Photography, Teaching

Talks and Presentations

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I have been a member of Lancaster Photographic Society for about five years now, ever since my wife and I moved to Lancaster.

Each week throughout autumn and winter we meet, and usually the photographers who come and offer presentations to us are detailing projects and genres that are very personal to them.

They tell some amazing stories, they sometimes go pretty in-depth into the technical aspects of how they do what they do, detail the circumstances that led them to be where they are today, and list some of the challenges they have faced along the way.

Occasionally we have a speaker from our own membership, somebody interesting, worldly, and presenting images the rest of us could only dream of creating.  So when I was first asked to present a talk, I was quite surprised.

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