Our Programme Secretary, Sue, with assistance from Zoom served us up another treat this evening with a beautifully illustrated talk by Russian-born UK-based Polina Plotnikova. This very accomplished photographer showcased her various projects centred around ‘Flower Portraits’ and her take on Still Life. In each case Polina started by showing examples of painters who had influenced her work followed by a wide range of her own images and technical advice on studio set-ups. Included within this were examples from her FRPS panel of flowers which were past their best.
She explained how she started from her pre-visualisation of the finished image. Then, by carefully setting up the subject or subjects against a chosen background with a variety of lighting methods she was able to achieve the desired effect as nearly as possible in camera. A few of the more surrealistic ones involved props which were cloned out in Photoshop but post-processing was kept to a minimum. Polina is a Lensbaby ambassador and gave some good examples of how to create images with selective focal points.
Even if you had limited interest in the main subject matter this talk provided a wonderful evening’s entertainment and some good tips to help everyone’s photography.
