The Butterfly Ball

It was a great privilege to be the official event photographer at the Butterfly Ball held at the Craxton Wood Hotel near Chester on June 28th. The Ball celebrated the 60th anniversary of the North West Cancer Research Fund and was sponsored by the Employment Law Advisory Services, Boodles and Dot Art.

The NWCRF injects much needed finance into essential research into cancer via the Universities of Liverpool, Lancaster and Bangor. Since the Fund began in 1948, the same year in which the NHS was created, it has raised well over £22 million.

We are delighted to make our own donation to the Fund and look forward to many more years of working together with all the dedicated staff and volunteers.

Forthcoming Shows

There has been an alteration to the dates on which I will be exhibiting and selling work in the Darwin Shopping Centre in Shrewsbury. The revised dates are now 19th – 26th July and 27th September – 4th October. I apologise for any inconvenience in the change to the dates but look forward to seeing you all in July and September.

The dates are yet to be confirmed, but I will be taking up an exhibition slot in Retford in Nottinghamshire later this summer. Please come back for more details.

Smell the Coffee

Every now and again there comes along a rare gem of a book. For me such an occasion was ‘A Quiet Belief in Angels’ by Roger Ellory. The author has achieved a rare quality for me. He has produced a story as powerful and haunting as Harper Lee’s ‘To Kill a Mocking Bird’. Lee’s singular masterpiece has always defined a sense of childhood and growing up in a world in which danger and adversity walk hand in hand with innocence and the sense of fun and adventure a long hot summer’s day can bring. It was a very visual book and so too is Ellory’s. His descriptive powers place you right there in the sweltering heat of Georgia, amongst the smells of the kitchen and the dust laden landscape. You feel the prickly heat as the story graphically unfolds before you. Being a huge fan of 1940s and 1950s movies the images often form in black and white in my mind before exploding into full colour with the all too graphic revelations of the book. This is not a book for the feint hearted. It makes you gasp. It makes you rub your eyes as you would if you saw these events happening before you. For a photographer with imagination this is a masterpiece of a book.