Author: Keswick Photographic Society

On Wednesday 15^th April Alan Walker, a long-standing member of the club, gave us a whistle stop tour of some of Earth’s colder regions focusing mainly on the wildlife to be found there. He started his tour in the Poles including both the Arctic and Antarctica. His first stop was Svalbard which is a remote Norwegian archipelago in the Arctic Ocean halfway between mainland Norway and the North Pole. The main reason for going there was to photograph Polar Bears:

Our Portfolio of the Year competition was held on April 8^th and judged by Sue Clark from Conwy Camera Club. Members can enter three images into the print section from three different genres and three images into the PDI section, again from different genres. Sue judged the prints first and made the following choices:

Best People (Figurative)- Her Ladyship Courting by Alan Walker:

On Wednesday 1^st April Richard Hodgson, who was born and raised on a Cumbrian dairy Farm, gave a fascinating talk titled “Field to Photo”. Richard has been taking photographs of farm animals for twenty years or so and is one of Britain’s leading livestock photographers. His interest developed when showing his family’s pedigree Holstein cattle. His work, which has taken him all over the country, has included providing images for various farming magazines, working for specialist breed societies, photographing for commercial companies to advertise their products and taking commissions for example when a farmer wants to sell his animals. He likes to take unusual images if possible.

On 11^th March Keswick Photographic Society held its audiovisual presentation evening. This is an annual event where members project a slideshow of a selection of their images accompanied by a musical soundtrack. There is no particular theme chosen so there is often a wide range of genres.

To start off this year our chairman, Tony Marsh, demonstrated the amazing diversity of colours and forms of the butterflies and moths found in Borneo. This was accompanied by a suitably exotic soundtrack of “Indo-Jazz”.

Our latest meeting was the 4th open competition of the 2025/26 season .
JohnFare  was our judge for the evening and he awarded six images the maximum 20 points.
Alan Walker – “Rustic mountain” Best Print + Best Landscape:

On Wednesday 18 February our guest speaker was Ann Miles who is a highly respected photographer from near Cambridge. She delivered her presentation via Zoom.  Ann’s talk was titled “Weather to Photograph” which covered how and what to photograph in different weather conditions including rain, mist and snow.

Ann particularly enjoys photographing in poor weather and she started by showing a selection of images taken in the rain. Many of her images included people carrying umbrellas which often make good pattern pictures. She also included images taken at night under cloudy skies, many in cities where the presence of clouds can enhance the scene by reflecting the street and other lights.