teaching photographic skills to young people aged between twelve and sixteen. Plans for the future
include obtaining Arts Council funding to set up a darkroom for the use of local photographers in the
basement of the theatre. In addition to running Oriel Colwyn, Paul is a practicing photographer and is
currently working on a project documenting the backstage work that supports the productions
presented in Theatr Colwyn. Running currently in the gallery, from 1st March to 30th April 2016, is
Made in Wales 2, an exhibition by members of the Welsh contemporary photography collective known
as ‘A Fine Beginning’ which has also recently been shown in Cardiff and in London.
Tilt and Shift – www.tiltandshiftphotography.co.uk
Having moved from Cheshire to Llanrwst in the Conwy Valley in 2013, to find a new home for their
creative output, photographers Eleri Griffiths and Dave Paddy opened Tilt and Shift as a studio
workshop, darkroom and a compact gallery space. Envisaged initially as a base for working on their
established practices and as a space to show (and sell) their own work, the idea of using the front shop
as a gallery for showing the work of other photographers was almost an afterthought but has now
resulted in a series of exhibitions of fine art prints. Starting in May 2015 with A Different Light,
featuring botanical images made using a flat-bed scanner (Toril Brancher and David Noble) and an
iphone (Rob Pitwell), they followed this in November with Matt Botwood’s intimate South Wales
landscapes in Travels in a Strange Land and then in January 2016 Lleol, a group exhibition by nine
photographers working locally in North Wales. Their most recent exhibition, A Pink Flamingo featured
a series of images made in USA using a large format 10” x 8” film camera by Jack Latham, a Welsh
photographer currently based in Brighton.
In addition to her commercial work, Eleri has a well established reputation as a social documentary
photographer having investigated alternative lifestyles using self-built low impact environmentally
friendly homes and more recently the lives of a group of West African women beekeepers and their
children in Cameroon (funded partly by a Joan Wakelin Bursary Award from the Royal Photographic
Society). She also works in collaboration with Paddy (as he prefers to be known) and they have worked
together on portrait projects at Appleby horse fair and all sixty of the AM’s of the Welsh Assembly’
photographed at a location of their choice within their constituency. Paddy’s own work has also
included documentary projects as well as well as large format fine art photography, often utilising
historical printing processes (cyanotype, xanthotype and platinum/palladium). Their future plans
include further exhibitions (Lin Cummins, Zed Nelson) and they are considering the possibility in the
longer term of using their darkroom for workshops for individual photographers or small groups of
two or three, particularly those interested in exploring these alternative processes.