We were very saddened to hear that Malcolm Leach passed away on 6 November 2018. Malcolm was a longstanding member of the club; in fact, he was a member for over 30 years. He was a very capable amateur photographer and was expert in Adobe’s Photoshop and Lightroom software for editing digital images.
Many members attribute much of their knowledge of these programs to the tutorials that Malcolm regularly presented at the club’s meetings as well as many one to one sessions with him. He generously shared his time and knowledge with everyone.
Like several other members, he experienced developing film in the darkroom and the transition to the digital photography technology that we take for granted today. His deep knowledge of digital photo editing, although grounded in traditional darkroom techniques, was based on having embraced the new technology. “Dodge and burn”, for example, was a darkroom technique which can be replicated in several ways in Photoshop and Lightroom. Malcolm taught us these and would regularly entreat us to use some Dodge and Burn to improve our photographs.
No one in the club matches Malcolm’s knowledge and practical application of Photoshop. His images could be made up of umpteen layers and would often be a composite from several images. Sometimes an image was to demonstrate a technique, sometimes just a bit of fun, and sometimes to be a competition winner. Even those not intended to be winners often turned out to be!
We, as fellow members, are all at different stages of our photographic journey. We may never gain the same knowledge as Malcolm, or have the skill and dedication to attain his level of expertise, but Malcolm opened our eyes to what might be possible, to look a little further down the path, and he encouraged us to take more steps along that journey.
We will all miss Malcolm’s friendship, humour and generosity of spirit.
Below we show some of his work.
The Practical Camera Club (of Southampton) 