THURSDAY 4th FEBRUARY 2021
SHEILA HAYCOX ARPS MPAGB/AV EFIAP
We are continuing to hold our meetings over Zoom and as such are still able to invite speakers from further afield. Under normal circumstances Sheila Haycox ARPS MPAGB/AV EFIAP, who lives in Devon, wouldn’t travel as far as Gloucestershire to give her talk so we were privileged that she agreed to join us over the internet. She explained that her interest in photography began back in the 1960’s but it wasn’t until the 1980’s that she became really serious about her hobby. ‘An Evening with Sheila’ consisted of several audio-visuals, an area of photography which started from her taking videos of her grandchildren – just for fun. She has since become only one of eight people in the United Kingdom to have gained a Photographic Merit in Audio-Visual.
Over the evening Sheila demonstrated her personal skill in producing a visual sequence of still images matching them with suitable transitions and harmonising them with background music or words. The range of different photographic subjects differed from dreamy landscapes in Britain to brightly coloured wildlife in Costa Rica, from a milking parlour in Devon to the pomp and circumstance of the annual carnival in Venice and the Autumn colours of Stourhead gardens to the tiled walls and floors of the inner sanctum of Leeds library.
Whilst in lockdown Sheila tackled several audio-visual projects and she was quite happy to share the new sequences with us. The first of these was entitled ‘Re-thatching’ and gave us all an insight as to how her neighbour’s cottage was re-thatched over the spring/summer months. Another was to set a series of photographs to a Beatles song. Sheila chose Imagine and although I am probably biased, being a lifelong Beatles fan, Sheila managed to interpret the lyrics, written and sung by John Lennon, with carefully chosen monochrome winter images to give, what I felt was, a very moving audio-visual.
All in all, the presentation was a rare treat for the members watching, the evening was packed with a variety of creative, humorous, travel and thought invoking ‘movies’.