Tranquility: One of Jeff Driscoll’s many works

IT WAS IN THE LATE 1980s that the club’s guest speaker Jeff Driscoll last visited Tenby Camera Club. The meeting held on 15th February was partly a revisit to his days of film and dark room procedures up to today’s modern digital and Photoshop techniques.

Jeff is from Swansea and is a member of the Abertawe Camera Club, his talk would take the club members on a journey through his personal world of photography entitled ‘Welcome to my World’.

When Jeff first took up photography he used a Ricoh XR7 and Mamiya 645 camera, which was first of a series of 4.6 x 6 SLR’s film cameras. He explained that under the heading ‘Early Days’ he showed members images that he had digitally re-mastered from the slides taken from the years gone by. Using his engineering background he showed the club simple methods and construction of a mini-studio with soft boxes and lighting all for a few pounds rather than spending hundreds. He showed examples he had taken and how he achieved colour popping and cross polarization 30 years ago, and how the ‘Harries Shutter’ a strip device with three colour filters. The effect is to produce by re-exposing the same frame through red, green and blue filters in turn, while keeping the camera steady. This generates a rainbow of colours around any object that moves within the frame. Jeff went on to show images of waterfalls captured with the ‘Harris shutter’ technique.

It was obvious to the audience that Jeff had a vivid imagination, and when his projects has he called them were displayed the wow factor came up. He had goldfish floating in light bulbs, a Coca Cola can floating with liquid pouring out into another can. His fascination for space was displayed when he explained how he constructed his image of the millennium falcon and a distant planet. He started asking himself am I a photographer taking models or a model maker taking photographs?

Due to work and family commitments it would be many years before Jeff returned to photography. It was only in the last six years he picked up the camera and his next title for the evening was ‘The return – Digital what’s it all about then?’ As he explained to start over again he went out and photographed everything, landscapes and in particular waterfalls, fungi, wild life, butterflies and dragon flies and using a compact camera with a waterproof housing photographing tropical fish. Following on from taking the previous images Jeff introduced us to his ‘Super Macro’ images. Macro photography became a fascination from almost the first image he took, using a 105mm focal length macro lens and extension tube allowing him to be within millimetres of the subject.

Following a short break the talk continued with ‘Still Life’ and ‘Smoke Trails’. To complete this journey of Jeff’s his final title was ‘Photoshop – is it really a dirty word’. His images again were stunning and his imagination was just outstanding and seemed to have no boundaries.

The Chairman thanked Jeff for this memorable evening and hoped it wouldn’t be 30 years before he came again.