Mandalas to Macros and More

Lee is a very experienced educator, photographer and judge and she talked us through how she goes about her photographic projects by researching many other photographers and putting her ideas down in a scrapbook first which crystallises how she wants to proceed. She talked us through her project on the restoration of the dilapidated and neglected Victorian Moseley Road Baths in Birmingham and showed the most wonderful mandalas she had created - which for those who don’t know is a Sanskrit word for circle and is a geometric design with a central point. Lee takes a small portion of the original image to convert and as she says you never know what you are going to get.  She brought with her some wonderful examples which had been turned into wall art and greetings cards.

Her second project was done the same way with research and putting ideas down in a scrapbook first and was on macro images of wildlife. Again she showed us the original images and what she had done to produce the final result – no mandalas this time but beautiful images of butterflies, insects and flowers both fresh and dying.

She also showed some of her students initial attempts at macro and long exposure and encouraged everyone to just get out there and experiment.

Val Brierley