CREATIVE   DIFFERENCES

The evening was split into two halves, with Adrian starting off the 1st part. Although they do their own talks, this joint talk is a new one for them both. They both showed 20 images each, a mixture of creative and straight, and explained how both were avid printers, which for them is the end result. For Adrian it’s all about the narrative, finding the right characters to start off with helps for straight images. Rather than taking lots of images of lots of different people/subjects, he prefers to pick a few with character already present, and then takes lots of images of the individuals. A lot of post processing is carried out, especially on their eyes. He prefers to do lots of little adjustments, rather than using preset filter packs which would adjust the whole image. The cut outs may not be the greatest, but he uses lots of smoke and mirrors to hide the joints. By keeping the contrast low on the background, so it’s just visible, but not over powering, and taking out the colour allows the foreground/subject to be pushed forward, by boosting it’s contrast. His way of working is he tends to do 1 image in a night, then final fiddle the next day, with a view to printing final image few days later.

Jane’s way of working in photoshop is different, all her layers are everywhere and she’s not as anal as Adrian’s (her words!). Rather than having a shopping list of images she wants, she tends to shoot an image then gets the idea from there. Again Jane showed us a mixture of images. She tone maps an individual to make them ‘pop’, by duplicating the layer, applying gaussian blur, then reducing the layer to 10%.

They tend to check out forthcoming events for the following year, and certainly Adrian is happy to take risks to get the shot. Although at the same events, they don’t necessarily get the same shot or even shoot the same people. Regardless if they did, each would get a slightly different perspective, or different interpretation of the same person when post processing.

They finished the evening by passing around some of their printed images.

A very enjoyable and inspiring evening by 2 of the countries leading creative photographers.