In the Making – Gareth Martin – Friday 13th November 2020.

Tonight, we were joined via Zoom by Welsh photographer Gareth Martin. Gareth began his photography journey in 1978; he started giving talks about his images in 1997 and began judging in 2002.

Gareth showed us a range of images covering a range of different topics, including many apparently mundane, everyday objects and scenes, with several of bathrooms and toilets! Also included were several images of the Welsh landscape. For many of these Gareth showed us how he actually achieved the final image. We were shown the steps he took from the raw image through to the final print or PDI. The print images were printed on various fine art papers so seeing the digital version of the images quite often doesn’t give a true impression of the quality of the printed version.

These images demonstrated many different techniques in Photoshop, including experimenting with levels and colour saturation. He also utilised a range of filters in the Filter Gallery (available for 8 bit images only) including the diffuse glow filter to give a grungy effect; the tonal contrast filter, graduated fog filter and the darken/lighten filter all to be found in Nik Color Efex and the pinhole and Antique plate presets in Nik Silver Efex, which all helped to achieve the desired grotty, grungy look in both colour and black and white images.

Gareth’s images also demonstrated several techniques when the images are being captured. These included ICM, ECM (Extreme Camera Movement), turning your camera upside down on its’ tripod and using ECM and long exposure, including yourself in images again, utilising long exposure.

Examples of Garth’s work can be found in PAGB E NEWS edition 257.

Thank you to Gareth for a very entertaining and informative evening. He certainly gave us plenty of food for thought!

Next week Jenny Hibbert will be delivering her presentation – Tales from the Riverbank.