An Evening with Colin Prior

I visited St Ives Photographic Club yesterday to hear a lecture by Colin Prior a well known landscape photographer. I had heard good reviews of his work but to put it mildly I found it disappointing. Although there were some very good images, there was a lot of repetition and some that were not so good. I left at the interval.

I wondered why the evening had worked out as it had given the reputation of the presenter. I came to the conclusion that it was the venue. The hall is a large room with very high ceilings and the roof trusses visible. Acoustics therefore were poor which made listening to the commentary very difficult. In addition the screen used was not of the best quality so that the images were not shown to their best.

Perhaps more importantly of all the placing of the screen meant that it was tiny in relation to its surroundings and most of the images were panoramas that filled less than a third of the screen. The effect was akin to trying to judge the image from a 6x7 en print that really does not work for the grandeur of landscapes. Interestingly the images that had the greatest impact were those that were almost full screen in size allowing the viewer to 'enter' the picture.

Lesson learnt - we need to be aware of the environment in which the photographs are going to be displayed to ensure the best chance of them having the impact desired.