Howard Tate began his talk, ‘Personal Prints with a Big Difference’, to Ilkley Camera Club by saying, “you’re not doing photography if you’re not doing prints”. True to his word, Howard lugged a number of huge boxes of oversized prints into the venue. He explained that part of a new extension at his home has been dedicated to storing his large prints.
Howard is a member of Pontefract Camera Club and Gamma Photoforum, a group of around 35 enthusiast and professional photographers in the North of England. He’s also an Associate of the Royal Photographic Society. He retired at 47 and started a photography business specialising in architectural images.
Howard’s project work often sees him going off on his own to make images, “I usually have two one week periods in the year without my wife. Conversly she has taken the opportunty to go of on her own with friends”.
In his presentation he showed members images from around the world including Scotland, Greece, Hong Kong and Dubai. Some of impressive images from Zion National Park in the US he said were taken from the roadside.
One of his projects is a study of Desert Trees which he said required step ladders and a drone.
There’s a trend for photographers to pay large sums of money for sofisticated cameras capable of increasingly high resolution images. Howard illustrated that older cameras with lower resolution can produce acceptable prints, “you don’t need the latest cameras. You can often use a phone to get good results”, he explained.
In his final set of images he explained a technique for photographing Linear Panoramas. These are achieved by taking a number of images at intervals along, say, a street. These frames are then stitched together to from a very long photos.