Rob
A professional life spent in the study and teaching of history, combined with a long-standing enthusiasm for photography, has helped to create my own view as to how past and present may be visualised in pictures.
On retirement I was able to spend more time working with my camera and postproduction software. I took a variety of photography and art courses and concentrated at various times on dramatic city buildings, urban grunge, survivals from the past and the people who inhabited that world.
For light relief from tramping city streets, I also took photographs of attractive buildings in their surroundings. Then I came across the work of photographers Klett and Larenkov. My discovery of their sub-discipline of re-photography revealed new way of presenting the past.
All photographers, consciously or not, speak from a position. But what the resulting photograph can uniquely do is
It’s an area that requires original archival research in tracking down and using old photographs, urban photography on the ground and postproduction editing at the desk. It appealed to the way I liked to work and led in some new directions.
My present collection reflects just a few examples of these different photographic enthusiasms – dramatic buildings that have outlived their time, people having deal with difficult environments, the living past, the beauty of buildings and the view of the world from them.
John
Given my first camera at the age of 10, and having had some early success ‘snapping’ a cousin’s wedding, my interest in photography began early in my life. Many years later, in 2019, after life, career and family had intervened, I had the opportunity to rekindle my love of making images and embarked upon the Open University / Royal Photographic Society Photography course. Along the way, I have been fortunate to meet some fellow minded artists and to have the privilege to share my passion with them. This exhibition is the result of our ‘journey’ together over the past 18 months, a journey with one rather nasty and unexpected bump in the road, which makes it doubly pleasurable to be able to present and share our work with you today.
Jon
Having taken photos all around the world since 1970, and my first digital images in 1999, it took me almost 50 years to “Go Manual” and acquire the knowledge to process digital images!
As with many, much of this delay was down to time available in a busy life. However, the Open University 10 Week Digital Imaging Course I attended in 2019 proved to be invaluable for reinforcing the basics and providing a platform of knowledge from which to develop. Joining the Royal Photographic Society has provided a further developmental platform with the incentivisation of its structured distinction programme and a wide variety of courses and events.
As you will see, I love photographing nature as it both gets you out into the fresh air and provides the challenge of capturing the moment – wildlife waits for no one and behaviour is often fleeting and in challenging photographic circumstances.
I hope you enjoy my images.
Heidi
Like most people of my age I had a Kodak brownie inherited from my parents that I took photos with as a child. I more seriously took up photography for my Duke of Edinburgh’s award as a teenager, where I took B&W film which I developed and printed myself in a DIY darkroom in my parents bathroom! Three children and twenty five years later a friend asked me to attend an adult education photography course with her, from there I went on and did a few more courses and finally the Open University course. My first love is ballet, and this has carried into my photography, but as I get older I also enjoy landscapes and am discovering studio sessions.
Richard
My photographic journey started when I took my first photograph at the age of six under the eagle eye of my father who was a professional photographer. The photograph was of my mother and father, the family Morris 1000 and a view of woodland behind, as a photograph it worked, early success is a great encourager. I was following in my family footsteps, my grandfather in 1895 had taken a photograph using a pinhole camera of the marshes at Bognor Regis, he was then apprenticed to the Donald Massey Photographic Studio in Bognor. I lived at Margate, I grew up in a photographic world, the family business was beach, postcard, commercial industrial, studio, school and wedding photography.
I learnt the fundamental photographic principle that any photograph is seen, taken and then processed. For my career I had to choose between photography and geology. I chose geology, photography becoming my “hobby” and my camera travelled with me wherever my geological career took me.
On retirement I decided that I needed to refresh and upgrade my photographic skills and properly learn digital photography. Eight years before a friend had recommended the Open University / Royal Photographic Society Photography course, in 2019 I decided to follow his advice. I have not regretted that decision.
I will take pictures of anything that my “photographic eye” sees as having photographic potential. I am frequently drawn to the technical challenge of taking the potential picture that I envision. Increasingly I am getting extremely interested in the power, flexibility and potential artistic aspects of modern digital photographic processing. If asked which type of photography I am most interested in, I look at the distribution of what I take and will say “people”, “street photography” and “cityscape” closely followed by “landscape”, “seascape” and “nature”. I hope you enjoy the images that I am showing here.
