Steve Wells provides the lowdown on Thornbury Camera Club’s latest virtual meeting.

Photographs rarely come alone. They come in groups: a set of photographs of a holiday or a wedding. When showing photographs we often want to show a panel of three, four, five or more images: a group of images conceived as a single entity, not just grouped together.

The Kingswood Salver is a competition for panels of five images. Thornbury Camera Club will shortly be assembling its entry for the next competition. So, it was timely for Mike Martin (AWPF, AFIAP) from Bristol Photographic Society to join us on Zoom for an evening to talk about how to choose and arrange a set of images. Mike has been producing composite image and panels for nearly two decades and was behind the panel which came second in last year’s competition: “Seize the Moment”.

A theme which ran through his talk was consistency. Images should have similar backgrounds. Horizons should be level and at the same height, the colour balance should be similar. In a row of images think of the images at the ends as holding the images together: like bookends.

Images should be presented in a consistent way: the same height and width. Shapes should be echoed from one image to another: a vertical line in one matching a vertical line in another.

Links can form stories. One of the panels presented by Mike was of a frog. In the first image it was sitting on a leaf: in the second it was stepping off the leaf. In the final image it was by itself.

Looking at images in groups like this provides a new way to imagine the presentation of photographs. The club must now learn the lessons and produce an image for the Kingswood Salver, knowing that it will be set against a panel assembled by Mike.