CCC Forum

I was looking at some Art programmes on my computer and thought as probably a lot of us are going to be sitting at home, why don't we do a bit of creative work. We probably won't be going out taking pictures for a while, I hope for not too long.
What I was going to suggest was we all have a great deal of images that haven't worked out or you took a picture that you thought might workout but haven't yet, so why not make composite images of them. Superimpose one on the other and see what happens.
Play around with solarising, inverting and collage, use the magnetic mask and move the section you cut out, around. I have always thought the way to work these is superfine edge control, blow them up to 200% and clean the lines up. You have seen some of my work and jacks stuff its great fun as well as worth doing. if you have photoshop or something similar you should be able to do things adequately, you all have time now, experiment be creative.
How about try doing two or three images and we could have a competition when we get back.
I hope you don't think I am teaching grandma to suck eggs, but try it.
Lets hope we all survive this trauma and come out the other side fit and well. Good luck everyone.
happy experimenting
Regards Wally

I agree with Wally that the next few weeks/months are a good time to start going through your back catalogue. You never know what you will discover there. Pictures that you overlooked initially or can see better or alternative ways to process. In my case, I had an image from a session which I thought had not produced much of interest. It had been sitting on my hard drive for eight years before I came across it again. I suspect that two things had changed in the interim. The first was that with greater experience, my eye for a good shot had improved. The other was that more and better software options had become available which made processing easier. I ended up converting it to mono and used the excellent Silver Efex Pro which was only introduced some years after the shoot. Sometimes images which were difficult to process initially or did not work as well as expected can turn out better as new applications are introduced and existing ones enhanced. If you do find anything, show us some examples here.

The other benefit of having this extra time to go through existing work is the opportunity to weed out some of the rubbish and free up disk space. With the passage of time, it becomes easier to discard stuff which no longer has any interest or relevance. I constantly surprise myself by finding images which have obvious issues, such as being out of focus, which I did not just simply delete at the time. As my first example shows, weeding out needs to be done with some care although in my case I do not think I have many more gems hidden away on my computer.

In case anyone is interested, this is the shot which I found which ended up doing well for me. Those of you who have been members of our club for a while will recognise it.

I would like to recommend that this topic be moved to the Photo Challenge section were there is more room for a large up take of images.
Ron

Ronald Barker wrote:I would like to recommend that this topic be moved to the Photo Challenge section were there is more room for a large up take of images.
Ron

Let us see how this topic progresses. So far it has been about ideas for photography related activity rather than producing images. Both commentators so far have produced shots to support their points rather than showing new work.

We were going to remove the Photo Challenge forum as it had become redundant. Lethargy on the part of the moderator charged with transferring the threads from the forum and then deleting it (i.e. me) means that it is still in existence. The Photo Challenge forum's time might have come again if people are looking for set topics to shoot until normality returns. (I seem to have avoided the task for a reason, even if I did not know what it was.)

Leave a comment here if that is something you would like to do. If sufficient people are interested, we will put the wheels in motion.

2 Good suggestions!

I would like to add both are worthwhile pursuing from the point of view it can give your creativity a kick start/boost and additionally it allows you to experiment and explore your editing software to produce something different.

if you have recently upgraded your editing software reprocessing old images can sometimes bring out elements within the picture that the old software was not able to cope with - particularly if you captured the shot in RAW!

Looking at your images with a fresh eye , can lead you to changing the composition or colouration to give a different emphasis to your picture

Or just kick back, chill out and enjoy! Whatever you do Stay safe