Quairading Photo Club

July 2023 Photo Competition

SUBJECT: CONTRAST

GOLD: ARUN (BULL ARAB DOG)

SILVER: ANN MARIE (COLOURED PENCILS)

BRONZE: ANN MARIE (PURPLE & YELLOW WILDFLOWER)

Last month’s subject was CONTRAST. Our photo competition subjects for this year have been focused more about the technical area of photography and the subject CONTRAST that is so frequently used in artwork and photography was another really interesting subject that became a combined learning area and we are now much more educated in this subject. Before taking my pics I searched on my mobile phone images of contrast pics & got some great ideas by looking at the vast array of contrast pics that other photographers had taken. After looking at other peoples pics, it is the easiest and quickest way to start the thought process of some ideas to photograph yourself for the competition. Contrast in a pic is about light tones and darker tones that is not just limited to black and white pics but is also important in colour photographs. A black and white pic that has high contrast will have very bright highlights and very dark shadows & this will make the pic POP. When wanting to get contrast in a colour pic to POP, you can instead of using light areas and dark areas, you can choose contrasting colours. There is a thing in the artworld called the colour wheel and this shows what colours are in contrast or simply, opposite to each other. The contrasting colours can in a colour pic enhance the mood and emotion of your pics, for example hotter colours like red can create a sense of energy and excitement, while cooler colours like blue can create a more calming and peaceful effect and you can kinda make your photo talk to the viewer. Contrast in a pic can be in many different forms, If your photo is black and white & you use tonal contrast positions from light to dark or if it is a colour pic that is full of vivid colours the contrast that is opposite will attract the eye and adds more visual interest to your photo composition. This is what we learnt during this months subject. A simple example of contrast is akin to something like a white dress that contrasts sharply with a black background, the person in the white dress will stand out in the crowd, the same white dress against a coloured background may still stand out, but it wont appear to have the same sharp contrast . Photographers have been using this technique for a long time and you see it in movies a lot. Think about a zoomed in shot of James Bond at the Monaco casino, his white jacket and black bow tie are a classic contrast, to draw attention to him above the others seated at the roulette wheel. When learning about what is contrast in a pic & then taking photos of something, we where using contrast to enhance a object in our pic. If the contrast wasn’t making the pic POP we had to alter & then reshoot our subject to get a pic with all the aspects of our composition bursting with contrast. Learning about contrast in a pic was really interesting, you can keep it simple or you can get to a point where it is all too complex The more we studied the more we learnt about the many areas that the word Contrast means in the world of art , and photography. For this subject after taking a heap of pics based on contrast pics we then had to choose our best 2 pics for the competition. Members had taken lots of different contrast pics of different things and to choose just 2 pics to enter in the competition was another interesting part of this subject. Just which pic would represent contrast & get lots of votes in the competition. With the subject contrast being so diverse ,at the last meeting it was interesting listening to other members discussing about what contrast we had achieved in our pics. At this meeting we where more like the Perth based photo clubs that really get into the technical side of a photograph. It made the judging and then voting of our photos really interesting as we had learnt heaps more about what is contrast in a pic.

When members take pics in the future we will be more educated about artwork and will be thinking about our photograph may look heaps better if we can make the contrast in our pic better . Our members are slowly doing patches on patches learning a little bit more about photography as the year progresses & with these photo competition subjects like Contrast we can learn & then still improve our pics after having a interesting subject like the one we had in July. Our next months subject will be BLURRED

MOTION .

Anybody can join the Quairading Photo Club. We meet at the Quairading CRC at 7pm on the 2nd Tuesday. Currently we need to get some more members, so if you have thought about checking out a Photo Club meeting, just roll up. You don’t need a flash camera, a lot of us use our mobile phones to take our winning pics.