20th Sept David Southwell: "Critique & Development"

23/09/11

I was pleased to be asked to propose the vote of thanks to our speaker at the end of the meeting and in my vote of thanks I mentioned that the event was certainly different.
David managed to engage the members in group conversation even to the extent of moving us around the tables to encourage further exchange of the member's views.
The main objective of this exercise being, to create dialog about our personal choice of picture, image ,or photograph as selected from books and magazines, all supplied by David, although this did create some interesting comments it also proved interesting in that it showed very differing points of views regarding our personal preferences, as most of us have very diverse interests in photography and " long may this exist " .
The second half of the evening , after the break proved to be very 'in depth', to the point that some members were getting a bit agitated, I personally felt that this was becoming a university lecture and was too late in the evening to concentrate on his ideology, although hopefully it maintained interest for some.
David worked very hard to present a meaningful evening with his main objectives, 'why are we taking this picture, what are we trying to convey, does it tell a story ' etcetera, etcetera, etcetera !
In all, I feel David's presentation is more suited to photographers with a leaning towards artistic and creative abilities and not necessarily the natural history subject , perhaps that's why I was asked to write this review.!

Brad Matthews