September brings the end of the school summer holidays, spiders and daddy long legs but it’s not all doom and gloom! The start of another season at Camera Club. It was great catching up with everyone and there was a tangible feeling of family within the room. It was wonderful to welcome five new guests and we really hope they enjoyed themselves and will go on to become members.

​

We launched the season with one of the best presentations I have seen to date. Sharon and Rob Prenton-Jones, two exceptional photographers who specialise in composites. The exuded as much personality as they did talent which made for an extremely entertaining, interesting and knowledge packed presentation. Their kindness was immense, sharing their knowledge and giving us techniques to use because their belief is everyone should be able to do what they do. Their pictures were awe inspiring and that is just what they did, they inspired me and from talking afterwards, many of our other members to dip their toe into the world of composites. Our composite king Ray will have to keep an eye out. They explained the process step by step and have even offered an aftercare service where they will help with any queries. They explained how they developed their individual styles and bantered over benefits of mist in a composite.

 

Here are a few of their tips for those who mist it (see what I did there) :

​

• Shoot windows wherever you go, you can then use them in your composites, and they become the light source. Watch the angle, you don’t want the view to be looking out of the window and not at your main subject so shoot on the perpendicular.

• Shoot models from all angles, that way you have a person with their back to you to put in a composite talking or observing someone else you put into your piece,.

• Have an awareness of your colour pallet.

• Have a narrative.

• When wanting soft shadow, large studio lights with multiple layers of diffusion and close to the model work best.

• You can use your phone to shoot images to use as backgrounds and texture.

• Black clouds and white fluffy clouds make good mist.

• [ & ] changes the size of the brush in Photoshop.

• For each shadow make a new layer.

​

If you want to look at their work their website is www.prentonjonesphotography.co.uk

​

All in all, a very strong start to the season, I am guessing a sign of things to come. There is a lot to look forwards to over the coming months.