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Most of us can make a technically good photograph and still feel it looks like everybody else's.
This is an evening about what changes when you stop treating the photograph as the finished thing and start treating it as raw material. Rikki O'Neill has been doing that for over forty years. He takes you through his images, from the earliest to the most recent, and tells you where each one came from and what he did to it.
 
Have a look first. Short highlights film here: https://youtu.be/KEgI0w5Z088
 
What you will take from it
Where ideas actually come from. The hardest part of making pictures that look like yours is deciding what to make. Rikki has forty years of that decision to talk about.
How to see ordinary things as raw material. Shop fronts, pub windows, peeling paint. Once you start looking at the world as things you can use rather than things you photograph, you do not stop.
A working method that is nothing like the tutorials. He has never used a mask in Photoshop. He paints backgrounds away with an airbrush, like the illustrator he trained as, and makes his own brushes out of photographs of clouds.
Permission to experiment. His advice for anyone stuck is to do the opposite of what you would normally do. Something big, make it small. Something small, make it big.
 
A taste of what is in it
He started out setting fire to his slides. He was certain digital would never catch on. There is a mannequin from a Primark window in one image and a galleon borrowed from a puppeteer in another. Asked whether he uses AI, he said no, and called it artificial interference.
 
What our community said on the night
Danelle: "Thanks Rikki for such an inspiring and thought provoking presentation. I will need to rewatch."
Alexandra: "This was super inspiring. Because of you I will pick up my camera again after a long time."
Malcolm: "I have wanted this for several years and tonight has surpassed all my expectations."
David: "We can pick up on some of his editing techniques but we will never acquire his imagination. That is what makes Rikki so special."
Ellen: "I am going to go out and just photograph for my textures. What a wonderful idea."
Sandie: "Inspired? You have blown our minds."
 
Worth knowing. This is an illustrated talk, not a workshop. Rikki explains how each image was made and why, but he does not build one on screen. Several people asked whether he would come back and do exactly that, and we are asking him.
 
Who it is for. Anyone whose photographs are technically fine and who wants them to look more like their own. You do not need to be able to paint, and you do not need any particular software.
 
Why we love this one. Our community asked for this session by name after Rikki's work went round our Facebook group. It turned out to be one of the most interesting evenings we have run, and one of the few where a lot of people said afterwards that they were going to go and try something.
 
About Rikki. Rikki O'Neill is an artist and photographer based in Dundee. He began as a trainee cartoonist at D.C. Thomson and spent much of his working life illustrating children's books, cartoons and greetings cards. He taught himself photography alongside it, over more than forty years, and is a Fellow of the Royal Photographic Society.