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Mick Durham is uniquely qualified to deliver an evening on “A Guide to Scottish Wildlife” as not only a Fellow of the Royal Photographic Society, but the current chair of its natural history distinctions panel. He also works providing professionally guided trips to observe & photograph Scottish wildlife with “Shetland Nature” and has a background in teaching & outdoor activities. It’s an impressive combination & we weren’t disappointed.

We are used to visitors envious of where we live, but Mick showed a collection of what can be found in nature not very far away if you know where to look. He did have gremlins to defeat in travelling down from Dumfries through “Cumbrian” weather and unusual traffic chaos, before seeing off his computer’s challenges.

Rather than a technical lecture, the presentation was primarily an engaging travelogue of trips he has led within the last couple of years to Mull and to Shetland in which he shared with wit & eloquence many of the highs & some of the lows, giving a wealth of information about the how, what & where of Scottish wildlife. His enthusiasm, love & respect for his subjects, & especially his passion for otters, shone through the many images, including of common birds seen in uncommonly beautiful surroundings and less often seen creatures such as Orca hunting seals, as well as flora & landscapes.

He finished with the best – a gallery of his own images, which were a showcase of what can be achieved with a camera around our native coastline from Croggan beach in Southern Mull, through Iona, Fingal’s Cave, & the Treshnish right up to the Nation’s northernmost landfall, at Muckle Flugga off Hermaness on the Shetland island of Unst, via Sumburgh Head, Noss & Yell. A masterful portfolio.

 

Our speakers on November 1st were Bob and Annie Given who are both award winning photographers. Despite living in Belfast, they are active members of Keswick Photographic Society and they regularly join our meetings via Zoom, indeed their presentation tonight was given this way.

Bob and Annie showed us an eclectic mix of their photographs and demonstrated that, despite often standing side by side, they produce very different images.

Annie opened the evening with a collection of people images, many taken in the studio but others taken elsewhere. She emphasised the need to develop a rapport with her models. She also showed some street and travel images taken from places as far afield as Morocco, Antarctica, and a number of locations in the USA including the Palouse in the state of Washington, Yellowstone and Big Sur in California.

Annie then talked about some of her images of sport, particularly athletics and rugby, and explained that it was the facial expressions of the participants that she sought to capture.

She finished her talk with a selection of architectural images, many of which were abstract in nature.

She described her approach to photography as simple with no complicated settings, basic processing and a lot of deleting!

Bob, who is well known for his superb sports images, entertained us for the second half of the evening starting with rugby.

He described how he had to sit on the ground in great discomfort for the duration of the matches in order to obtain his images. He looks for simplicity, which is not always possible in the chaos of a match. He then showed us images of a wide variety of sports including hockey, sailing, athletics, tennis and cricket.

Bob too takes photographs architecture and had a very different interpretation to Annie’s of the modern City of Arts and Sciences in Valencia designed by the Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava.

Other locations included Alcatraz and the City of London. Bob also takes travel images and he enjoys street photography. He explained that he finds the most productive approach is to sit quietly and unobtrusively on the pavement just waiting for people to pass by. He then showed a selection of portraits taken in the studio, including some he had transformed by inserting the figures into different backgrounds.

Finally, he showed a selection of landscape images including some from Ireland, Bruges, Svalbard and the USA.

Both Annie’s and Bob’s images were of an excellent quality and this was another entertaining and informative evening for Keswick’s members.

Julie Walker