Trefor Patten
Born in the capital city just over half a century ago, and growing up in the rural West Midlands, I now think of Bristol as my home (though I still smile at the Bristol 'L' or when people call me "My Lover". This great Western city provides me with plenty of subject matter for my pictures.
I have been a keen photographer for just over half my life. When the digital revolution first came along I was decidedly unimpressed. Even if you spent a small fortune on digital equipment you could not even come close to the quality of a 35mm film image, let alone any of the larger formats.
However, times have changed and you can now get very close to film quality without spending an awful lot of money and if you want to spend an awful lot of money, it could be argued that you achieve an image quality beyond that of film. What is far more interesting to me is the fact that freed from the cost and time of developing film you can afford in both the literal and the metaphorical sense to be more experimental.
Many of the pictures I am exhibiting have been taken, not on my semi-pro SLR, but on a compact digital camera. The joy of this is that it has remarkable low-light, close-up (macro) and wide-angle capabilities. Exploiting this combination of features, I have become very interested in finding the hidden beauty in everyday objects. For example, garden weeds, taken in extreme close-up can become altogether more attractive, an industrial site under dim artificial light can take on a surprising aesthetic, and the everyday can appear exotic.
Almost all of the pictures for the SBA trail have been taken locally, some literally in my own back yard, and while I continue to hanker after exotic locations and dramatic subject matter, it is really satisfying to produce fascinating images from the mundane.