One of the (few) benefits of Covid has been that a number of photographers have started giving (or selling) online presentations to camera clubs. This evening we benefited from another excellent show, from Nottingham photographer Gary Langley.
Gary isn't a photographer who can be pinned down to one style or subject. His portraits, often of punks, goths and other folk with body art, piercings and non-standard hairstyles, mostly presented in monochrome, feature a focus on the eyes. A wide angle lens acts to amplify the face with respect to the rest of the subject, with straight on eyes providing the centre of attention.
His wildlife shots have pin sharp eyes too, whether static shots of blue tits on twigs, or fish eagles swooping. A Canon shooter, he sharpens all his raw files. The trick with sharpening is knowing how much is enough, which Gary clearly does.
During lockdown, he has taken to shooting flowers- not against a black background as we were shown a year ago , but on a white lightboard, in styles that can be either highly artistic or sharply realistic as you might see in a field guide. I particularly liked the one of honeysuckle for it's three dimensionality, though he seemed to feel it was one of his less successful shots.
He also does IR photography, mostly landscape or nature images and some almost pen-and-ink like monochrome architectural images, particularly of church interiors, where he likes to combine different versions of a single image in Photoshop, editing one version for shadows and one for highlights to create an extended dynamic range image that reflects the light and dark reality as the eye saw it, without the OTT HDR effect.
Interesting to hear Gary prefers to stretch a single image. I have often wondered whether bracketing shots really makes much sense with digital raw files. Why take multiple shots when the same effect can be created, as he said, from one? The only case I can see is where, by averaging multiple shots , random shot noise can be reduced.
I have rarely seen quite such a huge range of wildly different styles in a single presentation.
I particularly loved the shots of the trained kestrel- and I now know to nail my mouse * to the post. (*The mouse having previously expired.)
Our thanks to Gary for an interesting and entertaining evening. I'd just remind him that there are nice beaches in East Lothian , lots of Eiders as well as gannets and I'm sure he and Louise would find lots to photograph around here once we get back to some sort of normal. (It's not Harris, but it's not so far to drive, either.)