Stevenage Photographic Society, Chris Pike Trophy, Clocks
27th January, Stevenage
Stevenage Photographic Society run an annual competition in honour of their foreman former chairman Christopher Pike. I joined the club after Christopher had passed away, but his family have presented a trophy which the club compete for in his honour on an annual basis. The theme for this year‘s competition was titled Clocks.
After giving some thought to how I would approach this I settled primarily on the idea of a broken clock. I found on eBay a job lot of broken clock components and springs etc for a cheap price.
I tried many arrangements of the components settling on the first one in the image below. I’ve blocked off the natural lighting and this was entirely artificially lit. There were three lights, the picture is back lit with an LED light hidden out of sight behind the central clock. There is a second LED light positioned just above table level to the right, the main light was a torch held above and to the left of the camera position projecting an elliptical circle of light onto the scene and illuminating the clock faces. On reviewing the original colour image I didn’t think the colours worked so I changed it to a contrasty black-and-white image. The elapsed time to take this image was probably about six hours with all of the other scenarios that I had worked on.
However, the competition requires three images, so I set up a simple shot of my pocket watch on a reflective base and then searching for the third shot. I found an old image of Big Ben that I submitted.
I was delighted that the judge chose my image, “Correct Twice A Day”, As the overall winner.
