THURSDAY 7th April 2022
a visit from members of
Sodbury and Yate Photographic Club
Stuart Lewis introduced the three members from Sodbury and Yate who were going to entertain us and it was Ray Grayson who started the evening off with his presentation ‘Potpourri of My Snaps’. Ray shared with us many landscape images from all around Britain, Scotland in colour and monochrome, the North Coast of Devon, Dartmoor, Cornwall and Yorkshire are just a few of the many delightful areas Ray has visited and captured ‘on film’. He then displayed his Photoshop skills with textured background flower images that he had taken not only in his back garden but also in numerous places he has visited, including a garden centre. He concluded his section of the evening with infrared images, a area of photography that Ray has a real interest in.
Cathy Fordham has a very keen interest in audio visuals and stamps her own artistic approach on everything she produces. The first of her works gave us an idea of how and from where she gets her ideas and she explained about finding appropriate fonts and music to accompany the images she selects for each audio visual. In an AV called ‘Transience’ she blended old sepia family photographs with recently taken images at Arnos Vale Cemetry giving a real feel for the brevity of life. ‘Soapsuds and Solace’ was a lockdown project where Cathy decided to ‘voice over’ her AV – it was a successful project as, with it, she was placed second in 2021 The Western Counties AV competition.
The third and final presentation of the evening was given by Dave Clarke. At Sodbury and Yate Club they have Special Interest Groups and Dave belongs to their Portrait Group. His presentation was all about the work that this small group of people have produced. He walked us through the artists and photographers that they intended to take their inspiration from and then showed the results that Annette Wakefield, Linda Parker, Keith Barlow and he has achieved. It was amazing to see how they had all managed to produce very similar images without actually replicating the works they took their guidance from. Ray ended his talk with ‘Rhapsody’ a storybook he had made of his wife and her journey to a keyboard recital performance.
It was a most entertaining evening with three very different presentations.