Last Thursday I went to a meeting of the Shrewsbury Photoclub at the Telpost Club in Abbey Foregate, Shrewsbury. It was the fifth time of meeting the people here and I’m glad I made the effort to go and join in.
I went to two of the previous meetings when they were still based in the Three Fishes pub, which was nice but not very conducive to having a load of people together as the pub was. abit small and had other people in there who may not have enjoyed photography.
The first time I went to meet them was at an event at Shrewsbury Abbey, where they’d organised an afternoon of photography in the wonderful church with most of us allowed up onto the roof of the main tower. It was something I’ve never considered doing and was a wonderful way to meet people interested in photography. The church is a beautiful building and I’ve been in there many times previously to capture images.
Since then I’ve been spending time chatting with members on their facebook page and this week the meet up was designed to give people a chance to try long exposure photography, with a few different lighting arrangements, props and interesting things to utilise. The pool table was used as a bit of a studio with some led video lights around the edge of the cushions and someone taking pot shots at toy cars to see if people could capture the event on their camera sensor.
In the corner was a chap sat enjoying the scene and at one point he turned into the model to be light painted, he looked to be enjoying it and I could hear some people’s surprise at the images they were coming away with. Maybe they’d never done long exposure before but waving a torch around and drawing bunny ears on a chap was quite new and exciting. I found it brilliant to see people spreading their love for the hobby to other interested and enthusiastic photographers.
I’d taken my Canon 5D with me so I was trying out a few shots of panning on the toy cars and the snooker balls but that was happening too fast so I tried some intentional camera movement, shooting through a glass of water and a few different angles, like reflections of a fruit machine screen etc. Most of my shots were a bit poor, I’d not used a tripod which I had in my car but I didn’t want to be tied down so was waving my camera about all over the place.. (Not really, but I was a bit wobbly on some shots)
When were uploading to facebook after the event I found it fascinating to see how different photographers had used the scene, lights and props to make their own sort of image. I uploaded a few of mine and one of them was a photo of the white pool cue ball sat still on the baise of the table. It was surrounded by three led lights, one red, one green and the other blue. I was intrigued, even though I understand why it happens, to see that the colours mixed on their way around the surface of the ball and you could see different hues develop,
We then had a chat about what we like to take photographs of, what cameras we preferred, where we go to take pictures and someone telling me all about his accidents, including a fall at the Mach Loop which immobilised him for a while. It’s always interesting to hear people take against another camera maker in jest, much the same as Android and Apple users have a friendly rivalry.
I got home, popped the images into Lightroom and had a sort through, marking many for rejection and deletion from the disk before deciding that I really liked the Intentional Camera Movement images. These are quite ethereal and poetic to my senses, some were more pleasing than others with some compositions, if you can call it that, not seeming to work.
Here are my images below and rest assured I’ll be going back again to meet with this group of like minded individuals to pick up some skills, tips, hints, info, gear, and opportunities to explore places one might not normally get to visit.
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