Passion For Wildlife: Kevin Pigney

This week saw our first monthly Zoom talk which was given by Kevin Pigney with a superb presentation titled “Passion for Wildlife”. Kevin hails from Burwell on the Suffolk / Cambridgeshire border. He only took up photography later in life as a hobby just over 7 years ago and is now an established professional photographer. His specialty is photographing wildlife with a particular passion for shots of Hares in their natural habitat. The presentation also included pictures of Foxes, Deer, Badgers, Owls, Water Fowl and birds of Prey. Kevin explained in detail his methodology to obtain the simply outstanding award winning shots he showed. In particularly that he lay on the ground if necessary so that he was at eye level whilst taking pictures of his chosen subjects especially the Hare.

Explaining to an appreciative audience the usage of the correct shutter speeds, overexposure if necessary and depth of field, often using a low sun to backlit his subjects. He also uses high speed bursts of shots so he can select the best one. Once back home he used in-camera editing, also a computer program to crop, denoise , defuse or sharpen the image before printing using Fine Art paper. Kevin has traveled to various locations in Britain including the Ratlin Cliffs in Yorkshire to photograph Gannets, to Skoma Island off Wales for pictures of Puffins and to the Cairngorm Mountains in the Scottish Highlands to photograph Mountain Hares during winter.

At the end of his presentation Kevin answered numerous questions from his enthusiastic audience who hoped to have him return for a further presentation.