For our May meeting we invited our members to think Out of the Box – and we certainly had many different interpretations: from the literal, with images of boxes of various kinds, to changes in ways of working – eg Angelika’s experiments with blurred painterly images in reaction to her normal desire for sharpness in her photographs; Mark’s use of a camera phone instead of an SLR for his street photography, having to get used to the time lag between pressing the shutter and exposure; and Lesley’s long ethereal exposures of herself moving in front of a white curtained window. There were examples of some unusual projects – Chris’s views of the Shard taken from every bridge from Battersea downstream and Rashida’s wonderful series of birthday messages to Nelson Mandela for Photography Giving in South Africa. Some people experimented with different subject matter and media – Maria’s still life pictures shot on colour film were a complete change from her normal subject matter, as were Jeanette’s photographs of the Epping branch line taken on a recent workshop. Sue’s approach was to question the difference between studio portraits and those taken in a more natural situation with thoughts of a new direction in her photography, and Ingrid challenged the conventional idea of a self-portrait by picturing herself as a variety of abject household items – happily things are looking up since taking them!

Angelika Berndt

Chris Burrows

Sue Czapska

Rashida Mangera

Mark Brown

Lavender Impressions by Maria Oldland

Pride by Jeannette Thomson

Self-Portrait as Used Toilet Roll by Ingrid Newton

Our next meeting will take place on Wednesday 12th June 2013 at 18.45 at the usual venue – The Artworkers Guild, 6 Queens Square, Bloomsbury, London WC1N 3AT. The topic will be Promoting Your Work – this could include submitting work to magazines, competitions and exhibitions, online presence such as websites, blogs and social media. Please feel free to share any tips or hints if you have had work published in any form. If you have one or two relevant images you wish to show please bring prints or digital images on a memory stick. If you want to talk about your website, a few screenshots would be very helpful (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Screenshot for ways to do it using Windows or Mac PCs). You can bring them as JPEGs on your memory stick