As a photographic society, one of our aims is to promote and encourage the understanding and appreciation of photography, and November’s club night certainly did that.
Dave Salter returned to present a selection of his macro and nature photographs in an engaging and inspirational evening. The images were just as good as we would expect from Dave, but his commentary and explanations were equally as interesting and educational.
We knew already that Dave is a regular visitor to Cringle plantation and reservoir, but we only understood how regular when he reeled off this summer’s statistics: Four months’ worth of daily visits amounted to six whole days in time, 90,000 image files and 1.7TB of data; and that was before spending time on his computer sorting through those images.
Beginning with some of his earliest attempts at macro photography, the progression of images through the years was accompanied by informative explanations with frequent touches of humour.
For example, when demonstrating how he composes and lights his images of toadstools, Dave used an ornament of one and admitted it was a gift from his children to recognise his “obsession” with fungi.
Dave’s presentation showed the evolution of his style and preference for simple uncluttered backgrounds, the challenges of restricted depth of field in macro, and how he works to improve and refine his work and style. He also detailed the equipment and settings he uses and stressed that it is important to slow down and make sure that the light is right, especially with subjects like toadstools that aren’t going to fly away!
One of the most interesting parts of the presentation was Dave’s examples of focus stacking, with the image below being one such image featuring 20 “slices” combined into one,
We are grateful to Dave for spending his birthday evening with us and sharing some inspirational images and informative commentary. We enjoyed it very much!
