THURSDAY 2nd DECEMBER
THE WILDLIFE OF FINLAND
CATE BARROW
Cate Barrow’s first visit to the club was back in March 2019 when she gave a talk entitled ‘Photographing UK Wildlife’. It was with great pleasure that we welcomed her back to be enthralled with her images and talk on ‘The Wildlife of Finland.
Cate has made several visits to Finland in each of the seasons and has travelled solo over vast areas of the wilderness in order to capture the wonderful images she quite happily shared with us.
The evening was split into two halves and at the beginning of each half, Cate showed a map of Finland highlighting the areas where she had taken her photographs. She gave a list of the equipment she had used, showed images of the stunning countryside she had driven and walked through and jaw dropping shots of the extremely basic conditions she had ‘lived’ in for the duration of her trip.
Cate explained that depending on the time of year you make your visit, the country itself throws out different challenges to photographers – the length of the day, the extremes of cold and heat, but most of all mosquitoes! However, it seemed that Cate coped with everything that was thrown at her and seized every available moment to capture the most wonderful images of birds, butterflies and animals in their natural habitat that the majority of us only see in books or on TV.
During her Spring and Summer visits, Cate has captured images of Osprey parents feeding their chicks in the eerie, beautiful clean sharp shots of European brown bears in cottongrass fields and the comely colours and patterns of the butterflies, all in different regions of Northern Finland. In the extreme weathers of the Autumn and Winter seasons, images of the woodland birds, especially the pretty pale orange colour of the wings and tail in flight of the Siberian jays, stood out magnificently against the dull winter sky. Cate was particularly pleased with the stoat in ermine images taken on her visit to a remote farmhouse near to the Russian boarder.
All in all it was a unique and captivating evening, the presentation was given with enthusiasm and each and every subject was beautifully photographed.
I am sure that all our members admire Cate’s courage, stamina and personal commitment to her adventures.