Thomas Peck entertained and educated us with his Zoom talk featuring a diverse range of architectural images taken in several Eurpean locations, and a host of tips and techniques that had been employed in their creation.

Many of his images of buildings were taken in black & white, using long exposures to create ‘fine art’ photographs of modern architecture, which have become very popular recently. Tom explained the importance of initially surveying the building from several perspectives before setting up his tripod and putting his neutral density filters to work. He looked for shapes, curves, lines, symmetry, vanishing points, angles and reflections to heighten the interest and impact of the final image.

He shared ideas on how to work with converging verticals by having a reference ‘true’ vertical in the image to provide balance. Several of his images featured a human to provide a sense of scale and he creatively used negative space in some bridge images to focus the viewers gaze. Not all his pictures had been taken with a high-end DSLR and some very impressive mobile phone images were shown.

Tom concluded his talk with the ‘before’ and ‘after’ images of a Belgian bridge, which he had transformed with his post-processing work and a lot of patience. Without doubt, this talk has given us a lot to work with as we prepare our images for an Architectural competition in February.

Our annual Christmas get together with partners took place at the Angel Hotel where we enjoyed festive fare and good conversation that extended well beyond photographic matters. Such was our enjoyment of the evening, and our relaxed state, that we dispensed with appointing a photographer to record the event and all had an evening off!