AV News 175 - February 2009
The High Arctic 80º North
Mike Hardcastle ARPS
On Friday evening 21st November
2008, Wilmslow Guild held one of
their “Miscellany” evenings. These
are shows which are usually, but
not always, organised by one of
their many interest groups but
which are open to everybody in the
large Main Hall.
This Friday it was the turn of the
AV Group to invite one of their long
standing members Colin Balls to
present a follow up to his Antarctic
adventure of a couple of years ago,
with his latest presentation following a trip to the High Arctic, entitled “The High
Arctic 80º North”.
Colin and his wife Rhona were ably backed up by colleagues from Kendal
and Grange Photographic Society, Lee and Bernadette Kitchenman who
specialise in Digital Video.
Colin is well known to probably every AV worker around and has many
photographic awards including the prestigious RPS Fenton Medal. He is well
known for his excellent production of AV sequences and this evening was
well up to his high standards. The projection was split into 9 separate stages
covering various elements of the trip.
We started with the flight to Oslo and
then on to Svalbard, an archipelago
which is the Northern most part of
Norway midway between the mainland
and the North Pole, The group of islands
is situated between 74º and 81º North
where permanent daylight lasts from
April until October.
The Russian cruise ship was
boarded at Longyearbyen on the
Spitsbergen island and the
adventure began.
In previous presentations we
have become used to Colins' wife
Rhona acting in a supporting role,
but this time it was different, she
had taken the plunge and bought
what was possibly the biggest Canon 100-400 mm image stabilised zoom
lens any AV’er has seen and with a camera attached at the far end of it,
developed a keen interest in wildlife photography during the trip.
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