Biographies

Christine Moore

Christine took up photography shortly after meeting Brian in 1991. A trip to the Farne Islands, off the north east coast of Northumberland, and encountering puffins for the first time inspired Christine to pick up a camera. From that moment on all spare time was devoted to natural history photography both in the UK and abroad.

Christine’s first love is bird photography and despite a back problem preventing her from carrying long telephoto lenses, has consistently produced excellent images of her chosen subjects, which have won many awards in camera club and regional competitions.


Brian Sugden

Brian became interested in photography in the late ‘60’s, however circumstances led to him selling his camera equipment as he pursued other interests, including rugby and ten pin bowling. In the mid ‘80’s, following convalescence from a minor operation, Brian decided to return to photography, though he did not specialise in any particular field until he met Christine, when they both discovered that they shared a love of the natural world.

They have travelled to most of the popular sites in the UK. As well as the Farne Islands, other favourite locations include Bass Rock, Gigrin Farm, Formby, Scotland along with the western isles and when a little closer to home, Lee Valley, Richmond Park and the London Wetland Centre in Barnes.

Florida has been a favourite destination for many years. Some may argue that the photography is easy, but with regular annual trips from 1997 until 2015 you have to work much harder to obtain something different and fortunately with every trip there has always been an encounter with a new species to photograph.

Now that they have both retired, they ran an engineering company for 10 years from 1997 to 2007, they can now devote even more time to photography. They have recently begun a love affair with Africa and have visited Botswana, Kenya, Namibia and South Africa.

They both shared very strong views on digital photography and were slow to make the change from film, delaying the inevitable until 2008. The latest technological advances especially with low light capabilities and improved auto-focus have easily surpassed film in digitals ability to capture consistently high quality images. Furthermore, once the equipment has been purchased digital is quite a bit cheaper than film. However, they do have issues with the level of manipulation evident in many of today’s images and being natural history photographers, strive to get it right in camera, using only Lightroom for post processing.

Their current list of equipment includes:-

Canon EOS 1D X camera body
Canon EOS 7D II camera body
Canon EOS 5D III camera body
Canon 300mm f/2.8L IS II USM lens
Canon 100-400mm f/4.5/5.6L IS II USM lens
Canon 70-200mm f/4L IS USM lens
Canon 24-105mm f/4L IS USM lens
Canon 17-40mm f/4L USM lens
Canon 1.4 III Extender