Take one for yourself and one for the Competition

That was the message when Andrew Mills came to the club on 18^th March

After a talk densely packed with illustration and detail we came away with two main messages:

• “Club competitions do not produce the best photography”, and

• “Where is the light coming from? Light is the single most important element in photography”

We also learned not to accept free drinks whilst engaged in a commercial shoot for a brewery.

Andrew is a professional photographer with many years’ experience in commercial, advertising and editorial photography, and as an author and senior lecturer teaching photography at degree level.

Prolifically illustrated with Andrew’s own images and the work of other photographers and artists, the talk covered composition, theme, narrative and above all, the understanding of light and how it works to create shadow and form.

At heart is the argument that camera clubs have got stuck in a bubble that merely produces ‘safe’ images, that judges tend to learn from watching other experienced judges, rewarding mundane recycling of popular styles and subjects rather than experiment and expression. We should be taking the pictures we want to take, not those we think fit the judge’s set of criteria. Or by all means take one for the competition, but try taking one for yourself too.

Images from well known photographers of the past came thick and fast, and Andrew asked the question ‘how many of those pictures would win a club competition?

Eyes closed, top of head cut off - Truman Capote by Irving Penn

On the wonk - Garry Winogrand. But its success lies in its immediacy, its framing, the backlighting and detail

Vivienne Meier took thousands of pictures whilst working as a nanny in Chicago. They were never published in her lifetime and very few people actually saw them. Julia Margaret Cameron knew how to take an in-focus picture, but that wasn’t the effect she wanted.

So we should take the picture we want to take – but it should be deliberate. For much of Andrew’s career he was using large format cameras, maximum iso was 400 and you only had 12 frames. Every shot had to be carefully planned and the lighting set up could be complex. It’s easy to take OK pictures with modern cameras, but that deliberation is the key to getting it right (or else it’s not, because sometimes immediacy and the unplanned are what you want).

Andrew’s advice was way too prolific to summarise, but just for starters - look at where things are in the frame, how the crop changes the story, the effect of the light and where it is coming from, look at juxtaposition and repetition, and look at other genres, what artists are doing with photography and what photographers are doing artistically. All in all we saw over 450 memorable images from photographic history and Andrew’s archive.

Andrew Mills