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Werribee Mansion Photo Shoot

By Neil Anderson - 18th May, 2018 filed in Shoot Reports

Friends of Werribee Park/Costume Program ensured WCC members had a wonderful day at Werribee Mansion on Saturday 12 May. The professionalism of the members of the Costume Program that dressed in “1870” costumes and their interaction with our members was great.

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The results of our second competition for the year are in. Our members thoroughly embraced the set subject of "Traces", producing some wonderful works that were judged by Graham Anderson. Read on to see the results.

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Big thanks to Chrisy who shared this piece with us... The video in the article is where it's at... if you thought dodging and burning in photoshop was difficult to master, consider Christopher Burkett's process: it sometimes takes him up to 8 hours to make a print in his non-digital process as he truely paints with light.

The "racing against time" in the headline of the original piece at PetaPixel at first had me thinking the poor guy was ill, thankfully not the case, rather Christopher works in an 8x10 format on Cibachrome paper which is no longer manufactured, but he's bought a 10-year supply. Only trouble is, once exposed and developed the Cibachrome will degrade over time and Christopher needs to make all the prints he wishes to before the original work is not longer viable.

True Puritans, Christopher and his wife travel to locations and look to find interesting scenes to shoot, sometimes that takes an hour, sometimes they stay for a whole week looking for the best shot. I think in the digital age a lot of us have lost the finesse it takes to make a great image. It's perhaps too easy to point and click rather than the effort it takes for folks like Christopher to lug around his huge 8x10 camera, set it up, move the bellows for depth of field and focus and another bellows for the lens hood. He has to be sure he has a shot to make before he goes through all that effort.

Following this process in finding his image, he then exposes it, you'll note his wife standing off the the side, making what I assume to be notes about his exposure settings (another thing we used to do quite often back in the day, before digital and metadata). But the real show of talent comes at around the 5:30 mark when you see how Christopher doges and burns his image during exposure. While you're seeing his process using Cibachrome, the process was much the same when exposing smaller film thought an enlarger onto photo paper.

Anyway, enough of my blathering, check out the video below from PBS News Hour for more, and be amazed at what people are still doing to make a photo.

Tarnagulla's Story's Gold

By James Troi - 17th April, 2018 filed in Cool Stuff

During the visit to St Arnaud and Donald a trio of our members had quite the chance encounter.

While at a cafe in Tarnagulla on Sunday the members were having a conversation about the town they had stopped in, they were handed a sheet of paper to read by the cafe owner, it was from the man sitting at the table next to them. Overhearing their conversation the man, a local resident and poet Ken Peake, had been inspired to put pen to paper and write his third poem for the day.

A regular at the cafe,  Mr Peake visits for coffee and inspiration to write is poems and on this day he had plenty.

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