With over half of the submitted entries to this year’s exhibition being selected for display, the standard of images from Winchester Photographic Society (WPS) continues to rise. Our spotlight this week falls on Glyn Paton, recipient of four WPS awards this year.
Glyn Paton is an experienced photographer and photographic judge, and a former President of Winchester Photographic Society. In the 2021 Annual Exhibition, he was the winner of the Portrait and Street-Urban categories, as well as receiving Certificates of Merit for his Free Subject and (second) Street-Urban images.
His portrait, “The Horse Dealer”, was captured on a trip to India with Paul Sansome, a professional travel photographer, where they visited the Nagaur Cattle Fair, held annually near Bikaner in Rajasthan, Northern India. Despite its name, the fair provides a market for horses and camels as well as cattle, and is held over three days, providing many photographic opportunities. Glyn spent an entire day there in misty conditions, photographing animals and their owners. In the last minutes of the day, the mist cleared briefly, and the golden light enabled him to capture this image, using an 85mm lens with an aperture of f/4, which showed some background detail of the horses whilst capturing the strong character of this rugged trader.
For his Street/Urban image, Glyn spent a day in the Soho area of London with Simon Ellingworth, a well-known photography tutor. Simon encouraged the group to find a suitable position outside a strip tease parlour and wait for someone to enter or exit. At the appropriate moment, a builder appeared from the shop next door and Glyn captured his image using a slow shutter speed of 1/30 second, which showed movement and played up the contrast between the builder and the adjacent poster. “For me, it was the elaborate tattoos on his legs and arms which really made the image” Glyn said afterwards. He also praised the Fuji X/T-3 camera used for this shot which, although relatively compact and suitable for street photography, produced high quality images from a difficult environment.
Glyn would normally have printed these images for exhibition and enjoys the process of printing, although he feels he hasn’t mastered it yet. “Printing from Photoshop requires a good deal of tweaking, and production of trial copies, before the final print looks as it does on my screen.” He hasn’t been able to travel over the past year, so has worked with images from his back catalogue and plans to progress to further photographic distinctions in the coming months.
You can scroll through all of this year’s selected images here, or visit Winchester Photographic Society’s website to view the images by category. Don’t forget to make a note of the number of your favourite image so that you can vote in this year’s People’s Choice award. Look out for links to vote from Culture on Call and from our shop.
You can also purchase prints of these stunning images via our online shop, with orders ready for collection from City Space, Winchester Discovery Centre, when the venue reopens. Prices start from £50.
The exhibition closes on 18 April 2021.
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