Peter Downs LRPS (25th Oct)

Our guest tonight was Peter Downs LRPS, competition Secretary for Morpeth Camera Club. Peter titled his talk for the night ‘What If’.  This referred to Peters rather unique style of post processing his images. More on that in a moment.

Peter commenced his presentation with some traditional landscape images taken in & around New Zealand, Scotland & Northumberland whilst admitting that he didn’t class himself as a landscape photographer.

Peter’s like for abstract, mono, minimalism & contrasty pictures encouraged him to seek more from his images, and so the title ‘What If’ derives from his decision to ’deconstruct’ images by saying “what if I tried this, or that”.  Peter starts with an image and then proceeds to deconstruct it by various methods including the use of blur, vignettes and removing detail and colour.  He then reconstructs the image using layers, presets & plugins so as to achieve a result unique and usually far removed from its initial look.

Peter admitted his delight in ‘challenging’ judges when entering his ‘unusual’ images in competition. He also reiterated his thoughts that we should not be driven by taking images purely for competition purposes but for ourselves and what appeals to us.
Peter answered questions from the floor and received the thanks of the members for his presentation.
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 Bob Finlay (President)