Graham Dean is a Lancashire based photography club member who regularly gives talks on his own patch. This presentation was in two distinct but connected parts. In the first section he took us through the history of photo manipulation since the dawn of our hobby. It would have been revealing to many that so many ‘tricks of the trade’ were applied to images to alter them over the last two centuries. A case in point was the work produced by Henry Peach Robinson in 1858 entitled ‘Fading Away’. Besides the finished image standing up to comparison with modern composites using old-style filters, it was interesting to learn that it was itself a composite of several images.
The second half of the talk illustrated the author’s own efforts to manipulate images to create the effect which he desired often using simple digital techniques available to most amateur photographers. His introductory slide of a sunset taken from his own attic presented with a quotation by neuroscientist, Beau Lotto, particularly struck a chord with those of us using basic manipulation of exposures to create what we saw in our mind’s eye when we took the picture. The camera sensor could not cope with the range of light values in one capture but the use of HDR or merging of similar frames at different settings can create what we intended in the first place.
In all it was a gentle tour through the subject delivered in an agreeable manner by a fellow club photographer.
