At the end of September we had Phil Newman speak to us about what constitutes a winning image in competitions or what will enhance your chances of selection for inclusion in exhibitions. In that talk we were shown various methods of achieving that which included the removal of distracting objects to the replacing whole sections of an original image with something more aesthetically pleasing i.e. combining parts of multiple (possibly mediocre) images together to make one good image (I was struggling a bit for a suitable adjective as I didn't want to use anything like 'stunning' or 'awesome' because not all composites are that so just plain old 'good' will have to do!).
This week took the concept of composites to another level with Jane Lazenby. With the number of distinctions after name - BA(hons) Fine Art, QTFE(2), ASEA, LRPS, CPAGB, BPE3, EFIAP, LMPA - she clearly knows what she is talking about. Her photographic passion is portraiture and horses - that's either photographing people or photographing horses or both together. The composites come in the form of 'Working With Textures'.
'Textures' come in the form of photographs of - well - 'things', anything that has got a texture. A concrete floor, a brick wall (but probably one of a single brick or block without the mortar lines), flaking paint, coffee stained paper, a rusty sheet of metal, a shiny tilted floor (again without the grout lines), chipboard, hardboard, any old wood, museum and gallery floors (if you can get away with it) - the list goes on, so quite literally anything with a texture, rough or smooth! You can even make your own by creating abstract watercolour pictures and photographing them, staining your own fabrics with whatever you wish. So the next time you spill red wine on that nice beige carpet, photograph it first, then try to clean it - and then photograph it again because you won't have got the stain out but you will have created a new texture.
Carry on like this and you will soon end up with a veritable library of texture images - probably as many images as you have skies to enhance your landscape and city scape creations!
Now that we have our textures, what do we do with them? Well, the same way as you would replace a dull sky with something more appropriate or dramatic - you layer, mask and blend using your favourite image editing software. The second half of Jane's talk was essentially a demonstration workshop on how she would change a variety of images of different subjects (both human and animal), originally in a not too flattering location into (and I will now use a superlative adjective) a 'stunning' image.
Textures are a boon for portrait photographers! No longer do they have to have expensive rolls of background paper cluttering up their studio, they can simply photograph their subjects anywhere and remove another sort of clutter and add an appropriate backdrop later. With a little bit of judicious editing, selecting a suitable pre-set blend mode, adjusting opacity here and tweaking colours and 'hey presto' you finish with yet another award winning image - well, hopefully ... !
I normally make a few notes while listening to the speakers to help with writing these pieces, but I have to say I was so engrossed with the ease at which Jane made the process look that I stopped and just watched the images being created before me. Unfortunately for me though, the 'logical' side of my brain has dominance over the 'creative' side and I was continually asking myself "how on earth did Jane think of that?".
29 October 2020.
Here are a few links where you can view some of Jane's work:
Youtube - EJLazenby Photography
and follow her on Instagram: @ejlazenbyphotography