Yesterday evening's presentation from an absolutely outstanding photographer kept over forty members enthralled for the whole evening.
Mark introduced himself and ran through his early life from his schooldays, when he was in the football team, to his retirement! He made no apologies for this journey which included several references to his father who he described as his inspiration. His dad was a photographer and Mark had never known a time in his life when there was not a camera around, and a good camera too because his dad allowed him to use the newspaper camera from work!
Mark explained how he rose to the heights of working for the Daily Mirror and, importantly, working in the Mirror dark room. From 1972 - 1975 he worked for an ad. agency and then he was recruited by the Home Office.
In this job he was responsible for training photographers and AV people when the Home Office was interested in the inner city riots - his images followed this route, Acquisition, Assess, Protection and Court! This led to film production and even more pictures of city centre riots, but he was always able to escape for short periods to the lake district for landscape photography.
1984 and Mark was involved in the miner's strike, flying pickets and Mr. Scargill. 1985 saw him photographing and recording the Heysel Stadium disaster and Bradford City disaster.
The Home Office needed a system to deal with English football hooligans at home and abroad and Mark helped in devising and putting this in place. This is now known as the National Crime Agency.
He covered the Tottenham Riots of 1989, the prison riots of 1990 and went on to make counter terrorism films.
This whistle-stop tour of disasters brought us to the break. When we resumed Mark shared how he makes a photo - assess, compose, expose and click! He said that he used Lightroom but doesn't take more than a couple of minutes in post processing. In addition to Lightroom he used Nik Collection Silver Effects.
He had an interesting way of dividing a day into sections. First, sunrise, then daytime (yes you can take pictures during the day!), Grim and finally Dusk. An interesting assessment of a photographic day but all the time he wove his fabulous landscapes of the Lake District and North Wales through his explanations.
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