Welcome to another late edition of Camera clips. This edition I have named the black edition after the black competition that we recently had. This was the first competition using the zoom platform. Paul Hughes made the following comments,
“After listening to the judge’s comments and seeing how badly my images did, I went back to the definition in the program. I was totally wrong… ‘dominated by black’…. I had entered images in which black was a key ingredient but did not ‘dominate’ . Oh dear… read the small print…. you live and learn!! “
I have never been a fan for tight definitions and prefer to allow some latitude to allow members the opportunity to be creative with a title. Having said that the judges often come with their own preconception of what a title means, so I guess a tight definition does help to spell it out for them.
Not withstanding I quite liked Paul’s image of the “Black Cat” Catalina and have decided to feature it as this months logo. In my mind it fits the title. Perhaps more so with the tighter crop. My Uncle Lionel flew a black cat during the second world war. They were based in Townsville and flew at night to lay mines in the enemy held harbours to disrupt Japanese shipping.
I have included notes from the product photography workshop that we ran on zoom. Have a look also at the work through of the ice splash image from the June 2018 edition of Camera Clips.
The truth is, black is a difficult subject. A number of articles on photographic exposure will often point out the dilemma of white swans and black horses. A correct exposure will give a mid tone grey, for both the swan and the horse. In order to show what the eye perceives the white swan should be slightly overexposed, and the black horse underexposed. Of course you don’t want to blow out the details in doing so. Also colour balance is easy to get wrong. I have featured a few other images from the competition, Steve Wallace’s car (above) and Heather Connolly’s Spider (below). Go and see the actual images on the club web page.
Ray Has given me 2 articles. The first is about collections of photographs, including the Holtermann Collection held by the State library of NSW. Have a look also at the article about George Caddy also from the State library of NSW. The second article about the Pentacon Pentina camera. Another classic 35mm film camera.
Have a look at those men in black swimming costumes. Their red faces come up quite dark in the monochrome. The first gentleman is quite muscular, the third quite stringy. The other two are rotund. The above picture comes from a glass plate film taken at Port Noarlunga around the beginning of the 20th Century. This is just one of hundreds of images held by the state library of another of my relatives, Rev. W.C. Brooker. I was surprised as anyone to discover this extensive collection of images as I was exploring the family tree, and have written an article about it. I decided to include this after reading Ray’s article on “the collection you might have in the attic”.
So read on and enjoy this edition of Camera clips.
Contents
Camera Clips 