On Wednesday 15th 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 8th 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 1st 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 11th 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.
Keswick Photographic Society can’t have ever had a more wide-ranging talk than this week’s from Jonny Gios who is a Jack of all trades and master of most.
He covered virtually the whole gamut of contemporary Cumbrian photography – primarily landscape, but showing people and places, wildlife, aviation, sport and photojournalism along with some drone photography and comments on videography.
Last week’s meeting of Keswick Photographic Society consisted of a friendly assessment of members own photographs which fitted the set subjects of Sports Photography or Photo-journalism. Our judge was fellow member, Bob Givens, a highly experienced sports photographer. The evening started with a wide variety of sports being featured; from lacrosse to fell-running, foot volleyball to rugby, high jumping to speedway, Cumbrian wrestling to football. The standard of the images was high and singled out for particular praise were David Woodthorpe’s speedway shot, “To Stay Clean Stay Ahead”:
Tom Peck spoke to us via zoom from his home on the history and development of Documentary Photography along with the related themes of War Photography, Street Photography and the Depiction of Englishness. He began by outlining the historical development of the subject, with reference to the iconic 1936 image of Florence Owens Thompson by Dorothea Lange. The title of the photograph is Migrant Mother and is often referred to as the “Mona Lisa of the 1930s.”
One of the society’s favourite evenings is the 10 x 10 x 10 and presented by ten volunteer members of Keswick Photographic Society (or occasionally 10 volunteered members!). They choose ten images and speak about them for no more than ten minutes. This year was no exception with plenty of volunteers coming forward to show some of their favourite images. There was no set theme and members could choose anything they wished. Not surprisingly there was a broad range of genres.
Colin Dixon began by showing images which influenced his interest in photography, from his early days of rock climbing, to some of the prestigious projects he became involved in, photographing historical architecture and sculptures. He concluded his presentation with some modern travel images from India.
