Culture Vulture!

I had a great morning with another Lit Fest event. This time it had a photography bent as I went to hear Doug Allan talk about his wildlife photography. Doug is a freelance photographer who has worked with David Attenborough on many of the BBC series like The Blue Planet, Planet Earth and Frozen Planet. He has spent many years in Antarctica and apparently he feels most comfortable at minus eighteen degrees!

He talked about how he got into photography, looking after your equipment at minus temperatures, his encounters with polar bears and developing relationships with animals amongst other things. He once spent eight weeks in the mountains trying to get a shot of a snow leopard, eventually was in the presence of one for an hour and it spent 50 minutes of that hour asleep!
He is a very good raconteur and is currently touring. His website is Dougallan.com if you want to check if he is going to be anywhere near you.

I then popped into the re-opened Art gallery and museum, called The Wilson. The photo is of a piece by Gloucestershire artist Colin Reid. Colin is a pioneer in the field of kiln-cast glass. It’s hard to do a piece of glass sculpture like this justice in a photograph as it honestly looked different from every angle with different reflections going on within the piece, I hope I have captured some of the beauty of it from this particular angle.

This piece is called Cello R1345 and is kiln-cast and polished optical glass cast from cello and violin scrolls. I found his work awe-inspiring, I will be back to spend more time in its presence. His website is colinreidglass.co.uk if you would like to see more of his work.