Recently the club was delighted to welcome Liam Marsh, a wildlife and natural history photographer. This was an enthralling and thoughtful presentation.

Perseverance was Liam's mantra and his work certainly showed that. His knowledge and observation of wildlife enabled him to create shooting opportunities that resulted in some thrilling pictures - but not without subjecting himself to long periods, often lying flat out in a stream, getting absolutely nothing! But this was more than just a succession of images. Mixed in were some illuminating shots and videos of how the images were obtained all of which added great variety to his talk. I'm sure most of us were startled when in one sequence he emerged like some monster from the path where he was camouflaged in his ghille suit!

Initially Liam showed how he created natural-looking shots by the careful preparation of landing sites in his own garden. This pain-staking work enabled him to train the birds to trust his environment. In this way he could obtain some first class pictures of small birds in flight or a characteristic pose. It was clear that to get images like these you had to know your subject’s habits and also to know exactly what it was you wanted to achieve in your photograph.

It’s true to say that Liam is an extremely talented and innovative photographer. He adapts and creates kit to enable photographing under water and knows just how to encourage butterflies to perform for his camera.

It was no surprise to learn that Liam has won several awards for his work including British Wildlife Photographer category winner for Wildlife in HD video ‘Spring on the River’ which featured his recording of the mating rituals of the bird the dipper.

If you would like to see more of Liam's work then he has an excellent website at http://www.liammarsh.co.uk