Every image has a story in 'The Power to Light', just opened at Aratoi. Anne Nelson had only ever used a 'point and shoot' camera and was just coming to grips with the manual camera and lenses she'd bought on Trade Me when she signed up for a portraiture workshop with the Wairarapa Camera Club last year. The three portraits she has in the exhibition belie her lack of experience.
'The key thing that I came away with was how important it is to put the person you are photographing at ease,' said Anne. She says this happened as soon as the model Olivia laid down, and Anne was able to achieve a serene image enhanced with the layering of a second image of a tree using Photoshop on her computer.
She's now more practiced with the camera but she's glad she took the plunge with the workshop. 'When you do something out of your comfort zone, you get the best results and it takes you the furthest.'
It was a case of being in the right place at the right time for Sid Hayes when he captured his theatrical image of Henley Lake; a reminder of the potential that exists on our back doorstep. 'We had a Club barbeque at the lake with the idea of taking some shots,' he said. 'I stood there with my tripod as the sun went down and took a shot about every minute as the sky was changing.' About thirty frames later came this image, taken just as the sun was going down. Hayes uses Adobe Lightroom but, surprisingly, this image has not been digitally manipulated and relies on knowing where to point - and the beauty of just being there.
Photography is both a career and a hobby for Mark Beatty who works with the digitizing collections team at the National Library of New Zealand. He joined the club recently having been invited to judge a club competition and being impressed with what the members were doing. 'The way people are using photos now is very different from what it once was, with social media and platforms like Instagram. I wanted to show that in my piece for the exhibition,' says Beatty.
His work is made up of dozens of his own Instagram posts taken from 2013 onwards. He uses the platform to follow and connect with other local photographers and keep up to date with what they are doing. 'This piece is about what I see through my work, and things that grab my attention at the time,' he says.
All images in The Power to Light are for sale, and the show runs until 3 July.
For more information on Wairarapa Camera Club go to www.wairarapacameraclub.org
Captions:
Clockwise from top: '@Beatpap' by Mark Beatty; 'Reflections' by Sid Hayes; and 'Ethereal' by Anne Nelson.