The meeting on Wednesday, April 12, was an evening of two halves.

The first hour took the form of a studio lighting set-up under the guidance of Tony Curtis and the second part of the evening involved processing the images taken using Lightroom which was demonstrated by Richard Leach.

Tony Curtis had converted part of our meeting room to a photographer’s studio with four lights set up in very different positions to demonstrate their effect on the images produced.

Tony’s camera was connected directly to a projector so that all the pictures taken were projected onto a screen and were then immediately visible to everyone.

There was continuous discussion with the audience while the photographs were being taken and we all learned something from this practical experience.

The technical aspects of lighting a subject to get the best photograph were demonstrated at length.

A basic set-up of three light sources was used to begin with: lighting from both left and right sides and from above. The intensity of the lights and their position were all adjusted to show the effect on the image. Getting the model’s hair to look good was resolved by placing a fourth light (a bright spotlight) directly behind the model’s head. Our thanks to member Sue Leeming for being the model for the evening.

Richard Leach then took over for the second part of the meeting and demonstrated some of the many features of Adobe Lightroom to improve the pictures.

For example, it was quite easy to make the background completely black and eliminate areas which were in fact shades of grey.

All the processing steps carried out by Richard were made clearly visible to the audience by using the projector that had earlier been connected to Tony’s camera for the studio session.

Tony wound up the evenings proceedings by thanking Richard for his demonstration of the Lightroom program.

In turn, he received a vote of thanks from all present for the work he had done to set up the lighting.

Our final meeting of the season will be the annual dinner and prize presentation at Creg Ny Baa on Wednesday, April 26.