Members of Motherwell Photographic Society travelled to Strathaven last Thursday for their annual joint meeting with Strathaven Camera Club. The guest speaker this year was Bill Fleming, a photojournalist with the Daily Record, who gave a superb talk on the subject of fashion and studio photography. Bill has been involved in professional photography for 27 years and illustrated his talk with photographs taken specifically on assignment for his newspaper. Starting with a selection of fashion photographs, taken in the unlikely but photogenic, setting of a scrap yard, Bill explained how he went about lighting his subjects for outdoor locations, photographic studios and indoor settingss which varied from brightly lit interiors to quite dark surroundings. He emphasised just how important is the contribution of the model in achieving good results and illustrated the point with some excellent photgoraphs take on a fashion shoot in the cloisters at Glasgow University. Warming to his theme Bill went on to show how the use of natural backlighting is so important for subjects taken out of doors and also illustrated the use of other lighting techniques using flash guns and reflectors. Photographing celebrities is another part of Bill's work and this section of his presentation was a real who's who with subjects as varied as snooker champion John Higgins and his family, British stars such as Lisa Snowdon and Billie Piper and Hollywood "A lister" Mel Gibson. Bill explained that when photographing visiting celebrities he very often only has a few minutes to build up a rapport and get some pictures that his editor is able to use in the paper. Bill answered many questions from the capacity audience and at the end of the night Motherwell President Wilson Murray, speaking on behalf of both clubs, thanked him for what had been a truly excellent, entertaining and informative talk. This Thursday Motherwell return to their home base at Holytown Community Centre for the annual theme competition for which the subjects are "Cityscapes" for the prints and "Liquid in Motion" for the projected images. The competition is judged by the members so entries may be brought along on the night.