This evening was in two parts. The first half consisted of two very well put together presentations by Chris West and Liz Barber on how they were recently awarded their LRPS Distinctions from the Royal Photographic Society.
Chris kicked off by giving us a resume of the RPS, its history and its location etc. He then told us what got him interested in obtaining his distinction. In a club competition he only got 12 points from the judge, who was an FRPS (Fellow of the RPS, their highest distinction). He was not at all pleased and set off walking the dog when he got home still ‘chuntering’. It got him thinking about the RPS and so before he went to bed he visited the RPS website. There he discovered that there was an advisory day on the following Saturday nearby and decided to attend. This really got him started and he went home and got all his best images together in Picassa (because it was free!!) and then set up his screen saver to go through them so he could decide on the best of the best. He then arranged them into a cohesive panel and then got them professionaly printed and mounted so that they were in pristine condition. He took them to Bath on Distinctions day and he was awarded his LRPS.
Then Liz took us through what she did on her photographic course, with images 'on screen’ that she took at college in Worthing. She did this course to further her photography, not to get her LRPS. The course was split into 9 modules over two years, and it involved a lot of studying into past top photographer’s work and involved learning a lot of different techniques and taking a lot of photographs, sometimes in interesting circumstances. She did an enormous amount of work as we saw in all her work books, (about ten or so large ones), which were on show at tea break. Having completed this course and passed it with distinction she qualified automatically for her LRPS, and she really deserved it! Chris remarked on the amount of work she had done compared to him.
During the tea break we also had a chance to see Chris’s panel, also Ian MacWhirter’s LRPS panel and Jean MacWhirter’s LRPS panel, which was gained with slides (as was mine) and which Ian had printed up for her.
After our tea break, Rob White and his partner Pash entertained us with some fantastic underwater photographs. Rob used to work with Chris and Facebook brought them together again! The first set of pictures were taken with Rob’s first underwater gear, which consisted of a compact camera in an Acrylic 6 inch cube with camera control knobs on it. The pictures looked absolutely fine to me, but later on he showed images taken with the gear he uses now which is a Canon SLR with a wide angled lens in a purpose-built waterproof covering for the camera with a big plastic half dome protecting the lens, with two arms with lights on them, and of course these later images were superior. He showed all this gear to us afterwards and apart from being quite expensive, it was also big and heavy on dry land!
Pash is also his underwater model, who being a keen and practised diver herself, positions herself to order with some of his subjects which gives them scale as well as enhancement.
The pictures Rob showed us of a large and diverse set of subjects were a real treat. Most of us have never really appreciated the brilliant colours of some fish, shrimps, sponges and corals. They were amazing, and other images of, for instance, a large Shark coming straight at the camera with its huge mouth open, looked downright dangerous!
Thank you Chris, Liz, Rob and Pash (who contributed as well) for a very informative and entertaining evening.