Unique portraits

What a wonderful day it has been.

I attended an online course called "Unique Portraits" run by Paul Hill and Maria Falconer. It was brilliant. Sue Hutton was there too.

Paul and Maria gave a lecture on the nature of portraits showing examples from many different photographers. Then we had time to make our own portraits.  According to the Tate Gallery, a portrait is a representation of a particular person. That gives lots of scope for images that don't even include the actual person of course.

I had woken this morning knowing that I was going to use a wide angle lens to photograph Mum, rather then the 85 mm portrait lens which I usually deploy at f2.8. My blip is one of the results. There is another in extras. I wanted to show her in the places she is usually found with all the things she needs around her.

This afternoon it was Self Portraits (with no mention of selfies!). We then had to make three images that were self portraits. This was more challenging and I tried to be a bit experimental. In the end it is the more standard image I am going to put on my Blipfoto main page.

To cap it all, I had in my diary a talk by Julian Germain on Facebook for the History of Consett Steelworks group. I nearly did not log in, but I'm so glad I did. Julian photographed in Consett 10 years after the closure of the steelworks. He kept walking around the perimeter of the site of the works and talking to people. (That walk is about 7 miles long.) 

We saw his work and heard the stories. Then, by chance, he came across old negatives and contact sheets from a local photographer called Tommy Harris. Tommy worked for The Company (the steel works) but also provided photographs for the local paper. His work was terrific. We saw how he took images in square format but knowing that the photo editor would crop the images for the paper. This in itself was fascinating.

I'm not sure I will sleep tonight after all this excitement.

PS I have loaded my self portrait but I don't think it works in a square crop. I'll leave it for now.  You have to imagine the rest!

PPS the icing on the cake: the photo book from the lockdown project of the Tynedale Photo Group arrived courtesy of Mystic Meg (thanks) and it is brilliant. We each have 6 images in the book.