Jed Wee

This evening (22nd Nov) we were delighted to welcome Jed Wee back to Cramlington CC.   Jed has been our guest on at least two previous occasions, including acting as a judge for our ‘Chris Crane Cup’ Competition.

For his talk this evening Jed took us on a landscape photography journey through several countries visited by Jed and a companion in recent years.

Sicily was the subject of the first set of images. Jed, with his companion who luckily spoke several languages made their trip to Sicily a few years ago, around February time.  Jed was eager to try and capture the beautiful landscape and see how the light changed the mood of an image when taken at different times of the day. Low evening light increasing the contrast and saturation of both the natural landscape and land turned over to agriculture.  As weather conditions were not always favourable or conducive to landscape photography a ‘plan B’ was required, and so focus changed to close up images of the textures on weathered & rotting wood & rust covered metalwork adorning the buildings and machinery so indicative of the harsh Sicilian climate.

Whilst in Sicily Jed was lucky enough to witness a large and sustained eruption from its active volcano, Etna. The summit of Etna, so often obscured by cloud, was clear and so the full power and beauty of the eruption was captured by Jed at sunset in stunning colour and infra red images.

Jed’s second location was Morocco. The city of Marrakech, a vibrant city teaming with life much of it, apparently looking for hand outs, where visits to a tannery followed and a palace to photograph Storks nesting on the roof.  An 8 hour drive and overnight stop then brought Jed south to the Sahara Desert, a most inhospitable place but a place that has photo opportunities in abundance, shown by the stunning images of massive sand dunes where the low evening light cast wonderful shadows across this baron landscape. Jed also had the opportunity here, taking advantage of no light pollution to photograph the Milky Way.

Milford Sound and Queenstown areas, in the south west of New Zealand’s South Island were our next destination.  Queenstown sits on the shores of Lake Wakatipu, where Jed showed stunning images taken of The Remarkables and Coronet Peak, both in colour and again infra red. New Zealand gets its fair share of rainfall evident by the many beautiful waterfalls throughout the island. Recent heavy rainfall in the area around Milford Sound gave Jed the opportunity to capture images of no less than 7 waterfalls cascading down from the cliff tops, some with the their flow almost halted and turned to mist by the strong winds and up drafts.

A trip to Iceland followed.  This again baron landscape is devoid of trees but bursting with hot springs and of course, photo opportunities. Images of hardy Icelandic ponies huddled together in snow storms alongside those of the icebergs on the probably most photographed ‘Iceberg Beach‘ show the harshness of this cold but stunning location.  

The final set of images for the evening centred around a trip north of the Arctic Circle in Norway.  Here we saw some stunning landscape images and some beautiful images of the Aurora Borealis

As always, to accompany his images Jed provided an excellent descriptive dialogue on the locations, the challenges they gave, and the photography they provided.

To finish his presentation Jed ran a ‘time lapse’ video to music showing the stunning flickering green, mauve and red ribbons of the Aurora Borealis.

At the end of the evening Jed answered questions from the members before receiving a round of applause for an excellent evenings entertainment.​

Bob Finlay (President)