A bit over a year after joining Yateley Camera Club, I decided I should have a stab at preparing a panel or two of printed images for the group's upcoming annual exhibition. Each member was allowed up to two print panels (a 'panel' in this context being a set of 6 to 9 prints in regulation 40x50cm board mounts), and some other members had talked about having one which was a more serious arty/competitive entry and a second which was more of a fun project, and I thought this sounded like a good plan. So for my serious entry, I chose to do a set of black-and-white macro shots of water in motion, titled Fluid Dynamics.
Despite the artsy intentions, the process was decidedly unglamorous: the pictures were taken in our conservatory in a range of glass vases, Pyrex dishes and maybe a washing-up bowl, using a patch of blank white wall panelling to fill in an unobtrusive background. As for the pebbles seen in some of the pictures, they were scavenged from the garden and then lobbed back outside with minimal ceremony when I was finished.
With hindsight, I could have made this job a lot easier for myself if I'd bought or borrowed a motion-triggered shutter release. Instead, each of the eventually printed photographs resulted from a rather haphazard trial-and-error process where I poured the water (or for the first image, dropped the pebble) where I wanted it and simultaneously tried to hit the remote shutter control at the correct moment, littering my SD card with numerous dud takes along the way.
Also with hindsight, my panel layout - alternating between horizontal and vertical orientations - wasn't a great choice, as it didn't work very well with the structure of the racking used to display the end result.
Perversely enough, despite this being the more serious effort out of my two panels for the 2019 expo, it ended up largely ignored, while my 'just for fun' second panel The Professionals was the one which seemed to catch fellow club members' imaginations. Such is life.
