Hey
It’s blog time again
When some daft old fool witters on about something or other
Ok
Tonight we were entertained by Tony.
Wait …
First let me explain about the club.
We are Springfield Camera Club, set up around fifty years ago to gather like minded peeps to delve the mysteries of photography.
We meet most Wednesdays throughout the year at Springfield Parish centre, that’s CM2 6GX for a couple of hours in the evening. Come check us out for free.
Our membership ranges from teenagers to really old peeps like me.
Our aim these days, well, it’s just a social club with cameras, no pressures.
Ok, back to Tony’s evening.
Tony & his lovely wife are globe trotters, always off discovering the world.
He has entertained us with photos from the Americas, Africa, and tonight it was Asia’s turn. Firstly the lower half of India, a trip down through Tamil Nadu and up through Kerala. These two don’t do the normal tours, they get down and dirty, showing us the lives of normal folks. There were a lot of edifices to the locals gods, fantastic structures, towering sixty plus metres into the sky, with unbelievable stone sculptures, Stonehenge? You should see what these people doing. Incredible wood carvings, stunning murals, and the colours … a real celebration to their deities. There was a temple hacked (a terrible description … lovingly carved over many generations) out of living rock by people with skills long forgotten.
We had shots of people making bronze figurines in what appeared to be the undercrofts of their houses, carving them in wax, creating a sand cast then pouring hot metals from a crucible. Health & Safety would be having apoplexies in our country. We were taken through the local markets, with weird things to eat, watched people making fine silk materials on looms that looked like they were built before the last world war. Saw colonial French buildings, visited a Jewish mosque, saw fishermen using what looked like a medieval ducking stool with nets to capture today’s dinner.
The second half of the evening, they took us from the golden triangle, an area between Myanmar, Thailand & Laos (famous for its opium in the past)
This tour took us across Laos through into Vietnam including in places, the Mekong River. Another trip amongst the ordinary people, this showed us life in the paddy fields, of a people still recovering from the Vietnamese war where the US dropped thousands of land mines, where it’s still not safe to go into the jungles.
Finally, they showed us a teaser of their recent trip to the Falkland Islands.
Watch this space for more.
Next (this) week we welcome David Hall to our house with his ‘Home from Home’ tour.
Doors open from 7:30 for an 8 start
Three quid for an evenings entertainment … can’t be that bad.