Through The Minds Eye
Tonight the club was visited by Heather Burns who gave us a presentation titled Through the Minds Eye. This was a fascinating look into Heather’s history as a photographer from her beginnings in taking pictures of rock bands such as Kiss, and how joining The Guild of Photographers taught her how to make her good images into great ones.
Soon Heather was adding textures and altering the overall colour palette and the awards started coming in. This led to Heather creating images from a variety of different elements, although themes began to appear in her work, such as steampunk influences, eyeballs, clocks and cogwheels.
During the first half of the evening Heather showed many examples of her work, explaining the thought process and the reason some of her images were taken/created, such as to illustrate stories, for book or band CD covers. She explained her lighting technique for portraits of both humans and animals and how some of these would be changed by the addition of other elements to give them her unique look.
The second half of the presentation looked at Heather’s Photoshop techniques, how she added textures and what from for instance. Heather showed before and after images sometimes supported by pictures of the individual subjects that made up her finished photograph. Surprisingly, Heather doesn’t use complicated methods to produce her eye-catching images, layers and opacity change along with dodging and burning was often all it took to bring her imagination to life. This was all explained in easy to understand language that will surely see some of our members trying some of these techniques out very soon.
The evening ended with a short question and answer session and the amount of questions put to Heather proved how interested the large audience had been in the work presented to them.
We would like to take this opportunity to thank Heather publicly for her engrossing and educational presentation that captivated the imaginations of all in attendance. This was certainly a superbly inspirational evening.
