Pedro, who now lives in Devon, spent 10 years in the US, part of that time in the Pacific Northwest, and part in New England in the Northeast. Being a very keen photographer, living there for this length of time gave him the opportunity to discover and photograph the spectacular landscapes and richly diverse wildlife in this big country.
Pedro is a physicist by profession working in a highly technical industry in which he developed a reputation for ‘doing detail.’ It wasn’t hard to imagine how this influenced his approach to photography where we were treated to so many top-quality pictures. He tended to stick with ‘realistic’ images; his wife, Morag, told him he didn’t have an artistic bone in his body. And what’s wrong with that? The question whether photography is art or not isn’t one that genuine photographers lose any sleep over.
So, could I pick out a photographic style here? Well, not really, and there’s nothing wrong with that either. Subject matter? Anything and everything – wildlife of all descriptions, landscapes of all kinds, sunrises, sunsets, sporting subjects, tulip fields, mountains and lakes, and yes, sometimes ‘arty’. Barely a photographic genre unexplored somewhere. Others have described his work as eclectic which does pretty much sum it up; he just takes photos he believes will make good pictures.
During the presentation, there were so many beautiful regions of the US explored with his camera, interspersed with amazing wildlife from a number of nature reserves and National Parks. I must confess, I had great difficulty keeping up, so I am not going to try to give a chronological account of them all. Perhaps you’ll forgive me if I just list a few of the locations that stuck in my mind: Mount Si in the Cascade Mountains and the rolling countryside of Palouse in Washington State, the Ecola State Park Oregon, the Canadian Rockies, Yosemite National Park and Bryce Canyon.
His final 18 months were spent in New England in Bedford just north of Boston. From here he visited a spectacularly beautiful nature reserve called Plum Island with 2 miles of sandy beach in Massachusetts. He said that you cannot live in New England without capturing the Fall colours, so we saw some of those too.
Pedro has very kindly allowed me to reproduce a few of the images we saw. The first three were included in the portfolio of 10 images for his CPAGB submission. To see even more of Pedro’s prolific output, visit his website at An Eye To The Hills. A very enjoyable evening Pedro so thank you so much from everyone at Photocraft.
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