Greg Lambert is one of our more itinerant members, sharing his time between South Carolina and here. We were fortunate enough to pin him down before he disappears again to share his understanding of working with additional and alternative lighting. Greg had put a lot of thought into how best to demonstrate his approach, with clear examples of different sorts of lighting and then a practical session shooting tethered, so that we could immediately see the effects of changed settings.
Greg talked about the four aspects of light: quantity, quality, direction and colour and the characteristics of hard and soft light. He dispelled the common myth that light gets softer if you back up away from the subject and showed instead how to use a diffuser or modifier to increase the light source relative to the size of the subject. He also very clearly and succinctly explained the practice of using on and/or off-camera flash as the only light source, first eliminating ambient light by changing your exposure to achieve a black image so that your flash is the only illumination. We looked at bouncing flash, using walls and reflectors and using radio triggers to control one or more flash units to build up the desired lighting effect. Greg finished by urging us to experiment, to consider how best to achieve the results we want by considering the nature of the light we have to play with - ambient, additional or alternative.

In the second half of the evening, those people who had brought along their cameras and flashes used the table of props for impromptu still life set-ups and there was a busy atmosphere of experimentation and discussion. It was acknowledged that many people prefer to mostly use available ambient light, but learning more techniques adds another string to the bow and increases our knowledge and understanding of the world of photographic possibilities. Many thanks to Greg for an interesting and fun evening.

In the ‘The Genius of Photography’, by Gerry Badger (BBC 2007), it is suggested that all photography makes a ‘collective and accumulative’ body of work - a ‘memory trace’. Within that, many photographers have worked on specific themes and projects, presenting their images as a narrative or as layers of deeper exploration, rather than individual ‘decisive moments’.

In this session, eight members of CoL&CPS shared their own projects and series of images and we really enjoyed a wide range of subjects and styles.
First up was Alan Ainsworth, with a poignant series telling the story of Mexican immigrant workers in central Florida, contrasting their poverty and life style with that off affluent coastal towns within twenty miles.
Des Hill followed with a cameo of his teenage introduction into photography when he cut his teeth on photographing his fathers haulage vehicles from different angles and in all weathers - only realising much later that this was a valuable social history record as well as giving personal pleasure to his father. His latest ongoing project is a series of photographers taking their shots.
Some people look back through their archive and recognise a recurrent theme or set of images which work well together or tell a story, whilst others choose to embark on a planned project and 
Dennis Law is an example of this second approach. He showed us the beginning of his series, taking pictures of the same magnificent oak tree in different seasons, to record the changes to leaves and light through the cycle of the year.
And now for something completely different; though still as a planned project from the outset,
Ian Stolerman described how he agreed to take photographs of his wife’s Jewish-Iraqi dishes to illustrate her self-published cookery book. He had brought the finished book with him and it was suggested that next time, we would like to sample the mouth-watering food, too. After the break, we were grateful to
Brian Groves, volunteering at the last moment to fill a space, with his brilliant series of beautiful flower and other images, with the added value of unexpected, hidden human faces which Brian invited us to also see. 
Ilya Fisher presented her ongoing project of finding abstract images of seaweed and detritus floating in the harbour water in Cornwall. She is enjoying experimenting with the changing light playing on the water and then seeing how processing can enhance her images by concentrating on texture, form and light.
Alan Larson is following an Open College of the Arts (OCA) course and his series formed his latest assignment, grounded in theory and research into the history of photography. He quoted from Susan Sontag and explained how his pictures of people taking selfies near Tower Bridge explored Henri Cartier-Bresson’s idea of the ‘decisive moment’.
Natalie Robinson rounded off the evening, talking about the series of eleven books and a set of prints she had brought for people to look at. Her approach is to look for themes and series in her collections of images taken on a particular journey, or on several journeys taken over time. By turning the series on texture, or salt etc into books, she is preserving the commonality of the images and illustrating the vital connection between the concept of the series of images and an audience or posterity.

Many thanks to all our contributors - as well as enjoying looking at and discussing the images and ways of processing and presentation, we were treated to snatches of cultural, geographical and historical information, whilst also getting to know more about each other. In the interval, we marked Keith Kavanagh’s success in the Flickr competition, ‘Moody’ by awarding him the Tiger Trophy. It was a great evening and a good introduction to the club, we hope, for the several new and enquiring members who joined us.