The BWPA exhibition has arrived in Moors Valley Country Park in Dorset and is there until 17^th March.  The exhibition opening night was last Friday 1^st February and I was honoured to be asked to give a talk about my photography and of course, the gannets.

The evening was a sell out quite early on and I had an open book for my talk. I decided to take the audience on the journey from when I began in wildlife photography and to a few of my favourite places along the way to getting last year’s winning shot.

Fallow deer in the UK and the meerkats of the Kalahari were my starting point before moving on to the coral reefs of the Philippines and my award winning images from 2007 in the British Ecological Society’s competition.

I then took the opportunity to concentrate on the local wildlife around Dorset and Hampshire. Diving beneath the waves I introduced the audience to Europe’s smallest marine fish, the wonderfully diverse patch reefs in Poole Bay and new arrivals to our shores in the form of colourful shrimps and washed up whales. In the New Forest I covered landscapes and fallow and red deer and what to do when the unexpected happens.

Finally I covered the gannets we photographed in Scotland last year. I described how we took the images and what it was like being in the water with birds diving all around us. To best illustrate this I produced a short video shot on my GoPro Hero 2 that I had mounted on top of my camera at the time.

The evening was a great success. Prints and calendars were sold afterwards and I had several requests to give more talks as a result. Hopefully I’ll be returning to Moors Valley later in the year.