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An audio-visual feast
11/11/2015
It was perfect timing when Judy Craig presented some of her excellent audio-visuals to the camera club recently. The most recent club meeting was on Armistice Day - always a time of poignant memories and reminders and so her two sequences featuring the fallen at Gallipoli and last year’s poppy installation at the Tower of London were both appropriate and moving.
The mood of the evening was lightened by Judy’s other presentation which showed that she is a master at this kind of photographic experience and not afraid of setting herself challenges beyond the creation of a perfect AV presentation. Having accepted a bet with a friend to produce a picture every day for a year, Judy’s ‘365 – a year in pictures’, was watched with considerable admiration. Her pictures in this lengthy sequence covered nearly every photographic technique possible. There were macro shots, wildlife images, sweeping panoramas, beaches, wildflowers, sunsets and pictures of people – all unfolding as the year 2014 unfolded before our eyes with the relentless progression of the seasons.
AV work needs far more than a lot images. To make a sequence interesting considerable expertise is required help the images unfold in ways that keep the viewer’s attention. So whilst Judy had employed traditional techniques such as fading in and out, page turns and overlaps she had also employed animation on several of her pages. One particularly memorable one was in a sequence on autumn where a leaf was seen tumbling across a page.
Two other AV sequences showed a different side to Judy’s work. One was of a holiday in British Colombia with images of grizzly bears catching salmon. Here we learnt that speaking quietly to an approaching grizzly was the best way to avoid being eaten something we were happy to take on trust knowing that hopefully we will never be in that situation.
Finally, a sequence entitled ‘Amazing Circles’ was an AV using a software technique that converts a rectangular shape into polar coordinates. Set to Joni Mitchell’s ‘The Circle Game’, Judy’s spiralling and rotating images provided a fitting finale to a highly entertaining evening.
The mood of the evening was lightened by Judy’s other presentation which showed that she is a master at this kind of photographic experience and not afraid of setting herself challenges beyond the creation of a perfect AV presentation. Having accepted a bet with a friend to produce a picture every day for a year, Judy’s ‘365 – a year in pictures’, was watched with considerable admiration. Her pictures in this lengthy sequence covered nearly every photographic technique possible. There were macro shots, wildlife images, sweeping panoramas, beaches, wildflowers, sunsets and pictures of people – all unfolding as the year 2014 unfolded before our eyes with the relentless progression of the seasons.
AV work needs far more than a lot images. To make a sequence interesting considerable expertise is required help the images unfold in ways that keep the viewer’s attention. So whilst Judy had employed traditional techniques such as fading in and out, page turns and overlaps she had also employed animation on several of her pages. One particularly memorable one was in a sequence on autumn where a leaf was seen tumbling across a page.
Two other AV sequences showed a different side to Judy’s work. One was of a holiday in British Colombia with images of grizzly bears catching salmon. Here we learnt that speaking quietly to an approaching grizzly was the best way to avoid being eaten something we were happy to take on trust knowing that hopefully we will never be in that situation.
Finally, a sequence entitled ‘Amazing Circles’ was an AV using a software technique that converts a rectangular shape into polar coordinates. Set to Joni Mitchell’s ‘The Circle Game’, Judy’s spiralling and rotating images provided a fitting finale to a highly entertaining evening.
