Ilkley Camera Club starts 2021 with photographs of great emotion and intensity. Guest speaker, Astrid McGechan, joins members via Zoom on 8 January with her lecture ‘Feel the Land – Photography & Emotion’.
Astrid is a freelance photographer and book author based in Surrey. She was greatly moved when a troubled visitor to her first exhibition said how looking at Astrid’s photographs made her feel much better: they conveyed a sense of harmony, beauty and calm, she said.
“I realised then,” says Astrid, “that being able to convey an emotion with my photographs is very important to me. So I started to try and be more aware of what I feel when exploring a scene, and determine what influence my state of mind has on the resulting photograph. Over time, this process has helped me to change the way I make my photographs, and, hopefully, to produce photographs that convey feelings and thoughts and thus evoke an emotional response in the viewer.”
In her lecture, she will explain how she tries to capture her emotions of the moment in a photograph, using a selection of her images to illustrate the various techniques that she has found helpful. “I aim to appeal to all levels of photographers, irrespective of their preference of subject matter,” she adds.
Astrid has curated several art exhibitions and judged photographic competitions. Her images have been published and widely exhibited in the UK and Europe, including the Mall Galleries and OXO Gallery in London, and the Horizons Photo Festival in Zingst, Germany, and are held in private collections in Europe and the US.
Ilkley Camera Club is currently meeting via Zoom at 7.30pm on Fridays. For more information contact us.