Les Loosemore 22 September 2025

Over the course of this evening, Les treated us to well over 100 of his prints displayed on ingenious stands built by Les himself.

The first batch were colour landscapes in a letterbox crop, many from near his home in south Wales with others from the Lake District and New England. Each one was introduced with a humorous anecdote with Les emphasising how the time of day was critical in getting the right light for landscape photography. It became clear that Les did not regard the latest equipment or software as necessary to produce great images, although a tripod was a key part of his set up. He encouraged us to try photographing scenes after dark and in other situations.

Les used the phrase “making before taking”, which I understood to mean having an image in your mind before pushing the button so that the amount of time needed to crop and process your image afterwards was less than when relying on processing and cropping to, often unsuccessfully, rescue a poor picture.

The second batch of images were all square-cropped, black and white images of trees. After introducing each set of images, Les invited us to inspect them closely and ask him questions. The quality of the prints led to questions about paper choice where Les advised us to have a matt, a smooth, a gloss and a textured paper available and pick the most suitable for each image.

After the break the evening continued with photographs of sports, not just football, which Les had played and referred at a high standard, but rugby, snooker, horse racing and speedway. Les mentioned the importance of understanding the sport in getting good images and how this was possible in a single shot without a rapid-fire shutter.

The range of Les’s skills was exemplified when he showed us his ICM images, all taken with a tripod in Australia after being forced to take evasive action when a bird flew out of a hole in a tree! These squared-cropped images were full of interesting shapes and textures using a palette of pastel colours.

Finally, Les ended a most enjoyable evening full of humour with a set of prints made from images taken on his mobile phone. Les encouraged us not to worry about how many pixels our cameras had or what a judge had said about our images. For Les a successful photograph is one he enjoyed taking which evokes memories of where and when he took it, a philosophy that I for one will try to adopt.