Quairading Photo Club

Photo Competition Winners

Mar GOLD ( 11 ) Ann Marie ( Russell & a PINA COLADA )

Mar SILVER ( 10 ) Ann Marie + Jessica ( Russell & a G & T / NATHAN & a JACKS )

Mar BRONZE ( 8 ) Cara ( SCOTT & ICED COFFEE)

Apr GOLD ( 18 ) Russell ( HAIR SPLASH IN THE OCEAN )

Apr SILVER ( 16 ) Ann Marie ( SPILT MILK SPLASH )

Apr BRONZE ( 15 ) Jessica ( DIRT TRACK PUDDLE SPLASH )

Our photo competition subject for March was a PERSON AND A DRINK. This was a opportunity to practise our Portrait Photography, you just had to have the sitter holding or drinking a drink. Portrait Photography has always been a powerful medium for capturing & recording the essence of a person's personality and character. If you take a pic of your family or friends & include their favourite drink in the composure, you will have captured a portrait pic for your family memory album. These pics will also tell a story, that will evoke a memory in years to come. For this subject, my first thoughts were to replicate a image of a famous movie character holding a drink in their hand. I would replicate a pic like you see on the advertisement posters for movies & it would be a lot of fun getting your model to dress up like a movie star. The plan was that persons viewing your portrait pic, would comment, Hey! that’s a pic just like that film poster, just like, GATSBY with a Prohibition Whiskey, 007 with a Vesper Martini, MARILYN with bubbles of Dom Perignon or a classic black and white pic like BOGART with a French 75 in a Casablanca Gin Joint. With these ideas on board you can envisage some compelling pics to take for this subject of people you know personally. With so many different drinks & matching attire for your model to be dressed in, plus all the different angles you can take a portrait pic there was an infinity of photo ideas. When taking photos for a PERSON & A DRINK, this subject made us draw on everything we had been taught and also taught our self about Portrait Photography, add a drink and get the background behind the person correct to get a award winning pic. Pics in the competition ranged from sitters donning on makeup & a glitzy red dress pretending to be aristocratic, sipping a colourful cocktail in a fancy glass, to a simplistic pic by Jessica of Mr March Pinup, Nathan, in a true blue Aussie blue singlet sucking on a can of Jacks & pics by Cara of Scott drinking iced coffee & another pic of her kids drinking milk. We learnt doing these pics, that to get the face of the sitter and the drink focused at the same time, many pics had to be taken to get it right, which added to learning something more about Portrait Photography. I would like everybody next time you see someone drinking a drink, snap a candid pic, something akin to grandparents sipping their ritual morning cuppa tea or kids guzzling a milk shake and snap a pic for your memories album. Your pic will capture a great memory of a PERSON & THEIR FAVOURITE DRINK.

April competition the subject was LIQUID SPLASH, we had endless possibilities for capturing dynamic striking images. We had a lot of fun adjusting our camera settings, as we where doing high speed photography, that we all still learning to do. This subject was a combination of creative + high speed photography. A lot of the pics where a result of doing experiments of getting some type of liquid to do a splashy thingy. We then took pics of our experiments, we had to adjust things we where photographing until we finally got the perfect pic. Taking a pic of something like milk splashing into a glass, it was somewhat amusing that after taking many pics, the pic you liked the most was completely different than what you set out to achieve, however you convinced yourself that you had created a stunning image that captured the ultimate liquid splash pic just like a professional. It was really pleasing to see at the meeting that the standard of pics was of a very high standard. Some of the splash pics where taken in the ocean, with items added like surfers on surf boards, sitters getting splashed by waves & water splashing out of sitters flicking their hair. Back on land we had liquid splash pics by dropping a rock in a puddle of water, a glass of spilt milk splash, water being splashed out of a glass & water coming out of a hose. When we viewed the pics at our meeting, it was really difficult to choose which pic to vote for because we had many great pics. This lead onto making the voting at the meeting really interesting because we had to think hard about how to critique artwork. If your kids what something to do because they are bored, tell them to grab someone and go take some LIQUID SPLASH photos, it will keep them entertained, which is what our members discovered when we did this subject, it was so much fun. Google some ideas to photograph & techniques, your kids can do photography & create images that are both visually striking and technically impressive.

Anybody can join the Quairading Photo Club. We meet at 7pm once a month on the 2nd Tuesday at the Quairading CRC

To join our photo club face book page & check out our pics, just search and request a invite & admin will sort it out.