On Tuesday 9th March we had a talk by Andrew S Gray on "ICM, my camera as a brush". Andrew is a Northumberland based photographer who specialises in intentional camera movement to produce fine art images which are capable of multiple interpretations. Andrew's camera movement while taking the image may be considered extreme by some. Much ICM photography encompasses only vertical or horizontal movement; Andrew's often involves swirls and figure of eight movement and he demonstrated one image which involved a full 180 degree rotation from land to sea and back again.
Andrew started by detailing how his initial attempts at photography moved through techniques such as traditional landscapes, infra red images, long exposure images, and long exposure while panning. One panned , long exposure image of waves won a WEX competition and this resulted in Andrew purchasing a 6 stop filter and beginning to concentrate on ICM.
Andrew showed how several images taken of the same location, of the same viewpoint, could lead to images which all resulted in a similar theme, but were capable of widely differing interpretations. Lots of Andrew's shots displayed a similar colour palette, mainly of browns and yellows, (which aids their commercial uptake as warmer images tend to sell better), and many featured differing views of BamburghCastle, sometimes recognisably so and sometimes not.
Finally Andrew rounded off by detailing some of the techniques he uses to processes the images and explaining the software that he used for post processing. A fascinating talk even for those photographers who tend to stick to traditional imagery, which was warmly received by over 50 members.