On Wednesday 7 May we were delighted to welcome Stan Farrow FRPS EFIAP DPAGB, Zooming in from his home near St Andrews in Fife, to tell us how he produces his wonderful photographic artwork.

Stan is a creative digital art photographer with many years of photographic experience (he saved his pocket money to buy his first camera at the age of eight or nine).  And after early retirement in 2005 he returned to university to study Art History and awakened interests in modern art (particularly of the late 20th Century) and the interface between photography and art.

Now Stan enjoys applying this interest in modern art to his photographic work, especially using Photoshop creatively to make new digital art.  He says his images are simple to create and he enjoys creating this new digital art just for the fun of creating it.

He has had many works accepted for exhibition worldwide and has won many awards in International Salons and photographic exhibitions.  He is also a member of Dundee Photographic Society.

Stan’s aims were to open our eyes to the world around us and to “engage your camera’s external control modules” – that is, our brains!  With artwork in mind, we needed to consider what to photograph and how to photograph it.

The camera is designed to produce representational images.  But Stan showed us how it can also be used for creative art.  He gave us a seemingly never-ending stream of ideas about subjects, backgrounds, layers, approaches, and techniques to kick-start our imaginations.

We needed to look for colours, patterns, textures, form, shape, abstractions, surrealism, etc.  He himself had drawn inspiration from abstract expressionism (artists such as Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Gerhart Richter, and Leah Downing).  He had sought to emulate this with close-ups of colourful graffiti on walls.  And this had been the basis of his FRPS panel in 2012.

Stan’s ideas and suggestions included all manner of things – such as frozen puddles, sanded paint on boat hulls (try close-ups looking for an “alternative story”), ICM, a new lens (an incentive to try new things), crystallising salt solutions, a huge and diverse variety of objects (ranging from seaweed through animal bird/skulls, seedheads, bottles, coloured Perspex squares, and old keys to jewellery and his grandfather’s pocket watch) assembled in different montages, a variety of different backgrounds (created with cardboard, MDF, modelling pastes, muslin, old linen, etc) and textures (from old lace, old legal deeds, books, maps/charts, etc), using a lightbox, corroded metal (treated with salt, vinegar, and/or bleach), coloured marbles and beads frozen in water, using selective blur, inverting images and changing the hues, multiple exposures, alcohol inks on Yupo (plasticised) paper, paint splodges, mirror images and rotations (almost like kaleidoscopes), cut outs and drop shadows, and so many more.

Stan probably had more ideas and suggestions than the late Tony Hart!  (Who remembers Vision On, Take Hart, and Hart Beat?)

Through all this, Stan encouraged us to “keep it simple” (his techniques are not complicated) and to try new things.

Lavishly illustrating his presentation with his own creative images, and telling us how he had gone about producing them, Stan certainly excited much interest in this sort of photographic work and emphatically stimulated our creative juices!

He finished with an Ansell Adams quotation – “When words become unclear, I shall focus with photographs.  When images become inadequate, I shall be content with silence.”

More of Stan’s work can be found on his website – https://www.stanfarrowphotography.co.uk/