The club’s first meeting of the new season saw a return from the excellent photographer, Sheila Haycox. Last time she visited us she turned up with boxes of beautiful prints. This time there were only a few prints to look at over the break so instead she offered us a look at many of her carefully themed and constructed audio-visual projects.

Sheila explained that the key to a good AV was not just having the images but also finding a story to fit them and then to create the right mood by careful choice of background music and voice-overs. She was also flexible with the truth in order to create the best story so that there was beginning, middle and end to all the presentations.
The presentations covered a wide range of topics from the purely travel shots to the humorous and documentary. Whilst creating an AV is a good way of utilising images which on their own would not be good competition shots, it was also clear that Sheila's AVs contained some really outstanding images that we have come to know her for.

There were some really memorable 'movies' including a sequence of pelican images from Greece which were so sharp that you could almost have believed they were in the room with us.
But there was also much to learn from several of the AVs including the ones on the harrowing life of service men in the WW2 Arctic convoys, the life of the Cuban people, the slate quarries of North Wales and of course the haunting sequence of the work of Friedel the art teacher in Terizin, Czechoslovakia.

This was a great start to the season with a presentation from a very quality photographer with a very creative approach.