On 1^st October, Richard Egan FRPS, DPAGB from York brought us his lecture "My Personal Selection", a rare chance to see what one of our oftentimes judges creates for himself. Despite being a regular winner of gold medals, the teacher in him humbled himself to show us not just how he tackled each image, but what alternatives there might have been and how he might even have bettered them!

His waterfalls, for instance, were shown with different shutter speeds, cropping for different formats and monochrome versus colour. By zooming right into the rocks in the Magnesia Well stream in the Valley Gardens, scale had no reference and it could have been anywhere, massive falls at the foot of a mountain even!

Trying his hand at sports photography, by using a 28mm wide-angle lens and crouching precariously low on the ground, Richard took some powerful shots of competing cyclists as they whizzed by! Not for the faint-hearted, but he gave us more tips as he showed us stunning air ballooning in Tunisia, water sports using the diagonal thrust of a canoeist's paddle to emphasise the dynamics; in horse-racing and jet-skiing, he used blur to express speed.

Lessons in natural history on the East coast gave us red cap mushrooms, wildflowers, kittiwakes and gannets; in ‘record’ photography, a selection of stained glass windows, London ‘street furniture’ from the London Eye to Westminster and close-ups of car bonnet mascots: Rolls Royce and Jaguar among them, which were suggestive of ‘portraiture’: Egan’s specialty!

Candid camera shots of clowns, cute kids and choirboys led the way to his modeled portraits, the ones we had long anticipated! Whether ‘dipping their toes in a river’, ‘running through a cornfield’ (a hint of the late great Lord Lichfield?) or in the studio, Egan’s models did justice to his truly poetic sensibility….