Guest Speaker – Jon Hawkins SWPP QINPP QAVS 

On the 6th November the club had a talk from professional photographer Jon Hawkins, who operates under the brand of “Surrey Hills Photography”. He is very local, living in Ash. His particular interest is wildlife.

His talk was lively and entertaining, with a mixture of top class still images together with some video, where he gave ‘in the field’ descriptions of how he was approaching certain shots.

Jon has had a number of images featured in newspapers, magazines, BBC Countryfile and on other channels. In his early years as a professional photographer, he undertook all sorts of assignments starting as a wedding photographer but also covering corporate, architectural, pets – actually pretty much anything. As he commented – now he is semi-retired, so gets to choose which he does!

He found his calling in nature photography. His presentation described how he got the ‘special’ shots, and he did indicate that certain shots had taken numerous attempts, and there were still some he had not yet achieved. Whilst it was not a technically detailed presentation, he did give an overview of how he used limited focus stacking for insects, and how pre-capture was a game changing feature of modern cameras. And how he had a lot of early mornings.

This presentation obviously appealed to the strong contingent of nature photographers in FCC, but even those of us who are not so passionate about nature photography could appreciate the top quality of the images which were shown. All in all, this was an excellent, entertaining presentation.

More info at About – Jon Hawkins