Photographic Society annual competitive exhibition opens today

The Annual Competitive Exhibition 2019 of the Gibraltar Photographic Society will be opening tonight at the Gustavo Bacarisas Gallery in Casemates.

The Governor Lieutenant General Edward Davies will open the event tonight at 7pm and will also present the trophies to the winners.

The exhibition will be open to the public from Tuesday September 24 to Friday October 4, between the hours of 10am and 5pm.

The exhibition consists of four sections:
Section A: Monochrome prints
Section B: Beginners Section of Monochrome and/or Colour prints
Section C: Colour Prints
Section D: Digital Photograph Images

The prints in Sections A, B and C are displayed on the walls over the five vaults of the Gallery, whilst the Digital images will be displayed on a large TV monitor, kindly loaned by the Alwani Group of Companies. A total of 279 prints are on exhibition, and 115 digital images displayed.

The Adjudicator for this year's Exhibition is Martin Addison, a Fellow of the Royal Photographic Society of the United Kingdom.

Mr Addison started taking photographs when he was about 15 and started to do it more intensively when he joined a camera club in 1970, since when he has never stopped and it has remained one of his most important hobbies ever since (the others being music and reading).

Initially he used colour slides and he started making audio-visual sequences in 1977 which were presented on a 4 projector system. Now he create AVs digitally using Proshow Producer.

In 1992 he started printing colour images on Cibachrome and got his FRPS in 1994 with Cibachrome prints. In 1997 he started using Photoshop, scanning slides for a few years before purchasing his first digital camera in 2004.

He was doing demonstrations of Photoshop fairly soon after he bought the program and continued to do so until a couple of years ago, now he uses Lightroom for pretty much everything. He currently runs workshops for Lightroom on a regular basis.

The other program he used extensively was Painter, originally Fractal Design and now under the Corel label. He started in 1998, not long after starting with Photoshop.

This is a big program designed for artists, but which can also be used by photographers. He started demonstrating that program and frequently got asked for a book on it, but there wasn't anything which dealt with its use by photographers, so he wrote 'Painter IX for Photographers' which was published by Focal Press. This was very successful and he went on to write another three updates for later versions of the program.

Apart from doing demonstrations, he lectures with his own images and has done so continually since his first lecture in 1979. Initially with audio-visual sequences, then colour slides, Cibachrome colour prints, digital prints and projected images. Having lectured for over 35 years he is now cutting down the number, partly because as bookings are often made over a year ahead, they get in the way when he wants to go on trips.

His photography tends to be wide ranging, but he is perhaps best known for making images that are just that bit different. He loves images that are not obvious at first viewing and he uses movement, multiple exposure and close ups of unlikely objects to help him do that.

He has run several workshops on creative photography, which focus on how to see images which are not obvious. His current print and PDI talk is called 'Looking Outside the Frame' with the subtitle 'How NOT to win competitions' and emphasises that you should take photographs for yourself not anyone else.

He also enjoys landscape images and tends to prefer the more intimate landscapes. City photography also appeals to him, from photographing people in their environment to the abstract images made possible by modern architecture.

He loves photography and likes to pass on his enthusiasm and knowledge to other photographers.