Dear All

Good to see everyone last night and weren’t we lucky with the weather, just think had it been tonight!

I started the meeting by taking a look at some of the things that have been energising me recently – besides being inspired by the work of other photographer’s, I also enjoy watching films, with many cinematographers displaying a visual flair that I admire so much in my work and something I try to replicate, with varied success I might say (in particular, back lighting and shadow work). Trailers for the new BBC2 series, The English, especially caught my attention, as some of the pictures were stunning. Having started to watch it, I have not been disappointed. Filmed in Spain, the director and writer, Hugo Blick, is clearly a master of his art and his location researcher should be commended for finding him some wonderful backdrops.

I then moved onto the colours of autumn. After an amazing summer, so far autumn has been noted for how mild it has been. This has lead to some to some excellent colour out in our open spaces, and much better than I can remember.  The weather is set fair for Friday and Saturday, so if you’d still like to catch some of it for yourself, might I suggest you take this opportunity, as it might be the last one, with more storms due next week.

We then moved onto Juliette’s suggested theme of ‘Spooky, Atmospheric and Moody’. There was lots of good stuff on show, stand outs for me being Sue Lorimer’s three pictures (and she was voted the winner of the evening and received one of my Wild about Barnes 2023 Calendars), Monireh for her clever ‘thinking outside the box’ and presenting supposed portals into other dimensions, so a mirror instance and Matt’s almost accidental ‘spectre’.

We finished the evening with a presentation by our relatively new member, Rodney Turtle, on his love of street photography. He took us through several of the genre’s, first looking at the work of some of the greats and then showing us how he tried to emulate their work. It was an excellent presentation and warmly applauded at the end. 

If anyone else would like to present something in future, please let me know. 

Inspired by Rodney’s talk, I suggested that we adopt one of his elements for our next theme – ‘Observational Street Photography, witty and humorous’.

There is no meeting in December, so we have 2 months until we meet again in January, so plenty of time for us to stake out a likely spot for a shot.
Cover image: Andrew Wilson

All the best AW