Viewfinders Newsletter May 2021

Photography Club of Brussels

Since 1994 Next meeting: 19 May - online

©Miguel Angel Vilar

Newsle�er 278, May 2021

www.viewfinders.be

newsletter@viewfinders.be

INTRODUCTION

©Alun Foster, Artwork: “Altar” by Kris Mar�n (Oostende)

By Alun Foster

S

erendipity rules … An interes�ng concept popped out of a recent conversa�on with an ar�st friend. (Well, I thought it was interes�ng…). I was admiring the crea�vity of the underlying concepts in their work, explaining that – as a photographer – I regard myself as something of a ‘func�onalist’ (at least, as far as my li�le business goes): I make photos that people need, mostly for purely prac�cal reasons (and, increasingly these days, making pictures of others’ ar�s�c crea�ons). I set up my kit, adjust the lights, make some necessary steps to be able to calibrate the outcome later and click…

“Oh, that’s very technical” they said. Which made me think – well, isn’t the knowledge of how your paints and colours combine and flow, how they cast their shadows on the canvas; how the clay and plaster forebears of your bronze sculptures bend to your will, expressing that inner purpose and beauty in a way I could never imitate; is that also not “technical”?

I am star�ng to wonder now if there is indeed such a clear polarisa�on between the “technical” and “crea�ve” aspects of any art. It is so that technical parts, once mastered, become second nature and we tend to no longer think about them: we concentrate on what we somehow feel in our mind’s eye when construc�ng the [insert name of artefact in ques�on here: e.g. photograph]. We are in that sense “being crea�ve”.

But if we never ques�on the technical part, won’t the output of our endeavours somehow converge to being the same a�er a while? Is it not a good idea to try out different technical approaches to see the result?

Experimenta�on costs nothing, but it does challenge the imagina�on, and from this can come some new, really great art. In the crea�vely technical land of technical crea�vity, serendipity rules …

Preview of the May 2021 Mee�ng Come and join us at our next Viewfinders club mee�ng on the evening of Wednesday, 19 May, star�ng at 20:00. The login informa�on for our online Zoom mee�ng will be sent by email several days prior to the mee�ng.

Alun will open the mee�ng with his announcements. This will be followed by a viewing of the photos that members submi�ed for the club’s project on Nega�ve Space. Miguel Angel Vilar explained this concept during the January mee�ng and his presenta�on can be found on the Tutorials page.

The main event of the evening is our external speaker, Thomas Vanoost. Thomas is a Belgian ar�st using photography as his medium. He graduated in photography from a local fine arts school while also studying philosophy and sociology. In 2016, he decided to devote himself to photography a�er he became painfully conscious of the chao�c world we live in. The results are his series ‘visions of daily chaos’. Heavily influenced by his background in philosophy, his work ques�ons our rela�onship to reality.

More informa�on about Thomas can be found here.

Looking forward to seeing you at the mee�ng, Richard Sylvester

2

VIEWFINDERS MEETING April 21

By Richard Sylvester

T

he Zoom mee�ng was well a�ended, with some 49 par�cipants. In his announcements at the start of the mee�ng, Alun men�oned several ac�vi�es that are planned for the rest of this season, including the Nega�ve Space project in May, and a return to photo walks in the hopefully not too distant future.

You can find all the pictures that par�cipated in the challenge here on the Viewfinders website.

Finally, Michael was thanked for his excellent comments on the photos and for all of the work that he did in preparing the Challenge.

Members were polled for the �ming of the next VF Café mee�ng, which was held on Sunday, 2 May at 8 PM. It was requested that the VF Café be con�nued during the summer months. Alun then presented the results of the previous poll on the contents of the Newsle�er and urged members to contribute to future Newsle�ers. Alun also men�oned that we will be looking for members to contribute to the func�oning of the club next season. A list of tasks will be prepared.

For the next item on the agenda, Philippe Clabots presented a very interes�ng tutorial on Dynamic Range (DR) and Contrast. DR is the range from the brightest to the darkest visible areas of an image that can be captured on a sensor, which unfortunately is not as great as that of the human eye. Contrast, on the other hand, is the degree of difference between the elements that form an image.

These may be differences in light (tone) or color, or they may be conceptual in nature.

©Philippe

Clabots

Philippe finished with an explana�on of Ansel Adam’s Zone System, which can be used to control contrast in black and white photos. Philippe also published a companion ar�cle about “High Dynamic Range” in the April 2021 Viewfinders Newsle�er.

The main event of the evening was one of our semi-annual Challenges, this �me on the subject of “Texture”, with Michael Chia, a Brussels photographer, as judge. The challenge proved to be very popular, with 26 members submi�ng a total of 51 images. The judge had his work cut out for him, as there was a broad interpreta�on of “Textures”, which included surfaces, food and liquids, and abstracts. His judging took into account image sharpness, exposure to create mood, interpreta�on and composi�on, and finally image simplicity.

©Nicolas

Jouveneaux

A�er the break, during which �me the par�cipants could vote for their People’s Choice, Michael provided construc�ve comments on approximately half of the images. He then presented and discussed his top 3 images: third place went to David Marsh for his “toothbrush” photo, second place went to Nicolas Jouveneaux for his image showing contrast and light in the texture of a green leaf, and first place went to Philippe Clabots for his contrast photo of “broken blue glass shards”.

The People’s Choice award went to Sabine Posdziech, with Honorable Men�ons going to Marci Bayona and Nicolas Jouveneaux.

©Sabine Posdziech

3

TRAVEL PHOTOGRAPHY Interview with Felicity Handford

All images ©Felicity Handford

F

elicity has been a member of Viewfinders since about 2010. At various �mes she has shared images of some of the fascina�ng countries she has visited, giving us glimpses of their cultures.

But what makes a picture a good travel photograph?

Clearly it is far more than an image being technically correct in terms of focus, exposure and framing. A good image draws the viewer in and causes them to stop and look at it. I enjoy looking at images that make me wonder about what is going on, that make me curious about who this person is, or what has (or is happening) in that place. For me travel photography is photography that takes place outside the area that I live in, that I’m not familiar with. For me it includes landscapes, cityscapes, buildings and of course people and what they are doing. The ‘people’ photography might be documentary, or it might be portraits.

Felicity, how long have you been travelling and how did you discover your love for photography?

I started to travel and take photographs seriously in 2011. I’ve always enjoyed taking photographs, but I really wanted to travel to Iceland. I realised that if I was to really get the most out my trip then I needed to buy a DSLR camera and learn how

to use it. So, I enrolled in a basic DSLR camera course and looked for photographic workshops in places I wanted to visit.

Every country I have visited has been interes�ng, and going on photographic holidays means that I’m with a group of likeminded people. The trips are arranged with photographers in mind, and being pushed out of my photographic comfort zones means that I have learnt about different genres of photography, and it has helped me to begin recognising what interests me most, and to begin to develop a personal style.

What would a�ract your a�en�on and make you take a picture?

I try to take images that say something about the place or what the person is doing and feeling. I’m only just beginning to understand something of how this might be done. It’s what interests me about photography, it is a constant challenge to learn and improve.

In observing people from across the world I have begun to realise how similar people are to us, even if they live in distant countries, and despite their different clothes and cultures.

4

It depends on where you travelling to, what sort of photography you are hoping to do, and what sort of hotel or place you are staying in. If you are going to stay in a 3-4 star hotel then security and charging equipment should not be a problem. However, if you are staying in a remote village you would do well to take an external ba�ery with you. I think also that it is very important to be sensi�ve to the people and culture around you. To try and communicate and give something back to the people you want to photograph, I believe that it is a privilege to visit other countries and we need to respect the people, their tradi�ons and places we visit.

Pripiat, Chernobyl, Ukraine

Do your prepare your trips taking into account precise photo loca�ons or do you discover them on the spot?

Clearly, if you understand something about the culture and what you are going to see it really helps, and hopefully as a result you take be�er photographs. On these holidays, at the end of each day, we are shown some photographs taken of the place or event we are visi�ng the following day. It gives the group a chance to think about what we are going to photograph. However, I think that I take my best photographs if I walk in the opposite direc�on from everyone else. I am then free to take the photographs that excite me without feeling that I should be taking the same images as everyone else.

What equipment are you usually travelling with?

I like to travel as light as possible. I used to take two cameras in case of problems, several lenses and a tripod. At the moment, I have a Nikon Z6 and the lens I would now travel with is a 24-200mm. Some of the places I have visited have been very dusty or rainy with no cover to change lenses.

Unless you are going to photograph landscapes or in low light, I’m not sure that a tripod is absolutely necessary. A really good camera bag is essen�al and knowing how you are going to travel around is another.

Which advice would you give to someone who travels for the first �me with more 'serious' equipment?

Kleifarvatu, Iceland

Bera man smoking during holy festival, India

5

MOONSHOTS - How to take photographs of the moon

By Bob Taylor

©Bob Taylor

F

or many photographers the moon is an interes�ng subject to photograph, which o�en proves difficult to capture. This ar�cle explains why, and shows how to get good Moon images.

The angular diameter of the moon in the sky is only about 0.5°, so unless a long telephoto lens is used, it will fill a very small part of the frame, even with a high megapixel camera the number of pixels that will cover the diameter of the moon will be quite low.

A full moon when the moon is near to its closest posi�on on its orbit is called a Supermoon. The moon photograph above was the Supermoon taken on the 27th April 2021, the next one will be very slightly larger on the 26th May 2021.

The graph on the next page is used to see how large the moon - measured in pixels to cover its diameter will appear on a digital image, using different lenses and sensors. It also indicates the average, minimum, and maximum size due to its orbital posi�on.

The moon’s orbit is slightly ellip�cal, so it appears larger or smaller depending upon its orbital posi�on.

6

To use the graph, find the actual focal length of the lens (NOT the 35mm equivalent) on the X axis, and follow the line up to the coloured lines that corresponds to the pixel size of your camera’s sensor. Where they cross, the number of pixels that will cover the diameter of the moon is found on the Y axis. As an example, a 300mm lens and a 5µm sensor will give an image of an average moon of about 540 pixels in diameter. Pixel sizes that fall between the lines on the graph are inversely propor�onal to the change in pixel size, e.g. a sensor with 4.4µm gives 10% fewer pixels than are shown on the 4µm sensor lines.

The moon reflects about 12% to 13%. of the light that hits its surface, so it is actually somewhat darker than the 18% grey that is used for photographic grey cards used to set ‘correct’ photographic exposure. From Earth, the part of the moon that we can see, is lit by sunshine that is brighter than the brightest sunshine seen on Earth. The light reflected from the moon sca�ers as it passes through our atmosphere, when near the horizon, it appears to be more red/orange as these colours are sca�ered less by the atmosphere, and it gets whiter as it rises in the sky, with the moonlight passing through less atmosphere. Unless you are using a long telephoto lens and spot metering, at night, most camera exposure systems will overexpose the moon as the metering system will be exposing mainly for the dark background. Since we know that on a clear night the sun is shining brightly on the moon, it is easiest to switch to manual exposure mode, using an exposure of 1/250th second at f8 @ ISO 100 or equivalent, and autofocusing, will deliver an image that is good for further processing (digital or nega�ve film).

The histogram of the cropped full moon image shows that the moon does not include the lightest and darkest tones, this is because it is a low contrast subject. To produce an image with good contrast and detail - using “levels adjustment” produces about 60 levels of brightness from a jpg image with significant gaps in between the levels. The same image recorded as a 14 bit RAW file - a�er adjus�ng the levels produces about 3,800 levels of brightness with no discernible gaps between the levels. The RAW image thus provides much more poten�al for further post processing.

Many of the more impressive photographs of the Moon and landscapes are actually produced by superimposing two images, one exposed for the Moon and the second exposed for the landscape.

A current trend is photographs of the moon posi�oned exactly at a key posi�on, such as just above, or framed by a geological or architectural feature. PhotoPills is a smartphone app (€10.99) that predicts the posi�on of the moon (or sun or Milky Way) based upon the �me, and the posi�on of the feature, and guides the photographer to be at the exact posi�on at the right �me to capture the planned image.

7

All images ©Janet Wishnetsky

MEET Janet Wishnetsky

I

arrived in Belgium from the U.S. way back in 1977 and was one of the early members of Viewfinders, though there was a hiatus of many years due to having to teach on Wednesday evenings.

When a high school friend showed me his darkroom, I was hooked! However it wasn’t until I got my first job at the Milwaukee Public Schools that I registered for a Basic Photography evening course, and when I took a second course in photojournalism, I knew that’s where my main interest lay. Once in Brussels, I proceeded to complete several years of studies at the Ville de Bruxelles Institute in Laeken, which I found completely uninspiring. They emphasized the technical aspects (which was never my strong point) and the instructors expressed no passion whatsoever for their chosen field.

My first photos published were on the cover of the local news magazine “L’évènement” when I went to Germany on a sudden whim to witness the American hostages finally released from Iran in January, 1981.

My gear (all non-digital) used to be: two Nikon FM2 bodies — one for B/W negatives and one for color slides — and an assortment of lenses (50mm, 28mm, zoom up to 200mm, flash, and filters).

Wherever my travels led me, I was always interested in visiting humanitarian projects. Organizations like Handicap International, UNHCR, Médecins Sans Frontières, and the World Food Program occasionally assisted me in getting to their projects in places with difficult access.

I’ve had only three individual photo exhibitions — on Burma, Kyrghyzstan, and Dagestan. I want to help people see unfamiliar parts of the world through my eyes, perhaps let go of their stereotypes, and understand that we are all brothers and sisters.

About eleven years ago I took up scuba diving and began shooting pictures and videos underwater, with no goal of publishing them but just for my own memories. I now use a little Go Pro with waterproof diving case and a smaller digital Olympus OM-D E-M5 II with a 12-50mm and 40150mm zooms, which I can use with an Olympus underwater case. Loving the ocean, but being a poor swimmer, diving helped me overcome my fear of drowning and allowed me to discover all the beauty underwater.

In addition to the many school vacations my teaching job provided, I took a year’s leave of absence three separate times to travel around Asia, the Middle East, the Soviet block countries in the mid-1980s, and the “Silk Road” in Central Asia — always solo, with backpack, a heavy Domke bag of photo equipment, an extremely low budget, but always with a spirit of adventure and the willingness to take Among my favourite photographers are Steve McCurry, Sebastião Salgado, and Henri Cartier Bresson. risks.

8

DISCOVERY

Find photo loca�ons with PIXEO There might be some photo spots in Belgium (or elsewhere) that you do NOT know yet!

Check out PIXEO and find some new loca�ons and �ps.

“Le grand mensonge” (“The big lie”) - Didier Bizet Immersion in the absurd with Didier Bizet.

The French photographer re-exploits pictures taken in North Korea in 2012 by adding details that surprise and might make you wonder if its real or maybe not.

Click here to view.

©Endre Sebok 9

FAMOUS PHOTOGRAPHERS: Brooke Shaden

By Sabine Posdziech

N

ever heard of Brooke Shaden before, and I must say that conceptual and fine art photography was not my cup of tea, un�l I a�ended “The Photography Show” in London in March 2021, online of course, where Brooke Shaden was invited as speaker. She was presen�ng her work and gave advice in a session en�tled “How to cri�que your own work”.

Watching her session, I was very much a�racted to her crea�ons, her way of storytelling and the carefully prepared set-ups.

Brooke Shaden is a young photographer born in 1987 in Pennsylvania, USA. At a young age she was convinced that she was going to be a writer, but then she graduated from college with a degree in filmmaking and English and wanted to be a cinematographer. She loved storytelling, and when she started photography in 2008 with her first DSLR in her hands she decided that this would be her tool to express herself and tell her stories with. Her aim was to create s�ll images of the surreal ideas she had in her head, and she started composi�ng dark, surreal worlds right away.

Her crea�ons are self-portraits where she becomes the characters of her dreams, which are inspired by an intense imagina�on and fear stemming from her childhood. Being the creator and the actor within her set-ups, Brooke controls the darkness and her fears and confronts them. She is using pain�ng techniques and carefully selected props to create her 'fantas�c reali�es'.

Brooke describes her work in these ten keywords: dark, mysterious, �meless, whimsical, surreal, fairy-tale, creepy, texture, square format, and haun�ng. She has always had this vision in her mind, from the short stories she used to write, to the films she made and now the images she creates.

Though each image is symbolically and conceptually different, the photographs are consistent in mood and genre.

Her process is more discovery than crea�on. She follows her curiosity into the unknown to see who her characters might become. The goal in her crea�ng is not only to sa�sfy herself; her greatest wish is to show others a part of themselves.

Brooke believes the greatest gi� an ar�st has is the ability to channel fears, hopes and experience into a representa�on of one's poten�al. Something you can feel in her pictures.

“I always conceptualize first. My process begins with a theme, and I work from that singular theme to figure out all secondary elements, including wardrobe, loca�on, colors, composi�on etc.

I draw a sketch and write a couple of paragraphs about the meaning behind the image. Once the conceptualiza�on is finished, I move on to shoo�ng, which usually occurs by myself (as I am a self-portrait ar�st). It takes about 5-15 minutes on average. I work minimally, so it's just me, my tripod, and my camera!

Finally, I move on to edi�ng, which always begins with the composi�ng. A�er the images are s�tched together, I work on changing the ligh�ng and color dynamics of the image, and end it with a texture. Edi�ng can take anywhere from 2-5 hours on average for a single image, but depending on the complexity, can range up to 50 hours.”

Brooke Shaden gallery Read more about Brooke

10

WHAT’S UP?

EXHIBITIONS Emerveillements - Ma�hieu Ricard Photo exhibi�on at Villers-la-Ville Abbey, from 2 April to 13 June 2021.

32 huge format photographs represen�ng the beauty of nature and life.

Displayed in and around the ruins of the Abbey.

The world of Steve McCurry Photo exhibi�on in Antwerp, from 12 May 2021.

The exhibi�on shows more than 200 pictures in large format. You will see his most famous photos from his career of more than 40 years, as well as some of his recent work.

Sous influence Exhibi�on from par�cipants of the photography workshop 'Bruxel, Art et Technique.'

Galerie Verhaeren, Brussels, from 5 to 13 June 2021.

©Steve McCurry 11

VIEWFINDERS CALENDAR 2020-2021 DATE

EVENT

DETAILS

19 May

Club Meeting

Negative Space Photo project

09 June

Club Meeting

AGM & members photos

COMMITTEE MEMBERS 2020-2021 President

Alun Foster

Vice President

Miguel Angel Vilar

Secretary

Richard Sylvester

Treasurer

Caroline Hendry

Membership Coordinator

Dagmara Jakubowska

Newsletter Publisher

Tine Stausholm

Newsletter Editor

Sabine Posdziech

IT Support Coordinator

Miguel Angel Vilar

Publicity Coordinator

Martin Schmid

Programme Coordinator

N/A

AssociateCommittee members:

Philippe Clabots Hector Epelbaum Robert Paridaens

©Endre Sebok

Alun

Miguel Angel

Richard

Caroline

Tine

Sabine

Martin

Philippe

Robert

If you are on Facebook,connect to the Viewfinders Group! It’s an informal group for sharing news on events, ‘for sale’items,interesting websites and news stories, or just to share some of your recent photos. newsletter@viewfinders.be

Bank account: BE133101 2440 7539

Any items from members for publication are welcome. Images are particularly welcome. Pleasesend them in as separate attachments (not embedded in emails or documents) in JPEGformat, with no less than 2000px on the long side and minimal compression. Please be aware that, in accordance with the layout, some cropping may occur. Pleasesend submissions to newsletter@viewfinders.be.

12

PHOTOS FROM MEMBERS

©Alun Foster

©Robert Paridaens

PHOTOS FROM MEMBERS

©Kaim Merali

©Kathy Moran

PHOTOS FROM MEMBERS

©Philippe Clabots

©David Marsh, third prize winner in the April Texture challenge