The committee of the Southern Photographic Society is delighted to announce that Brian Goldie has agreed to become the new President.
Brian has been a member of the club for over 30 years and is a well-known local photographer who was in the first wave to take up digital photography and brings a wealth of experience to the role.
By becoming the Society’s President, Brian follows in the footsteps of his father – founder member and former President Mike Goldie – who sadly passed away in January.
Brian explains how his interest in photography has developed over the years:
“I didn’t really start taking photos until my first foreign holiday in my late teens. I bought a compact camera and – just to get my own back on Dad for all the slide shows I’d had to sit through – I shot all the photos on slide film!
“After that I found myself hooked and the compact camera became restrictive so I bought my first SLR, which was a Praktica – a mainly manual camera which was a good way to learn.
“When I started to lack inspiration, Dad suggested I join the Southern Photographic Society and that is what has inspired and motivated me ever since.”
In the 1980s Brian completed an ‘O’ level in photography at night school and followed up by studying ‘A’ level photography at home as it was not offered by the college. He completed it in about six months and his result was in the top three of all the ‘A’ level photography entries that year.
However, one part of the course didn’t really appeal: “It involved quite a bit of darkroom work but I really didn’t see the attraction and found it hard to justify spending that much time locked away in a dark room.”
Instead, Brian’s interest was caught by the ability to digitise and manipulate his images after buying his first computer in the early 1990s: “In those days I had to send my slides to Kodak to have them scanned and they would come back on a CD,” he explains.
“I would manipulate them using a very basic software similar to “Paint”, which now comes free with Windows. I would then save these files to a “floppy disc” and send them off to a Lab to have them scanned back to slides.
“This was a lengthy and expensive process but it resulted in my first win in a photographic magazine competition, and I remember there was a lot of contention at the time due to digital manipulation being a rarity back then,” Brian recalls. “I entered a lot of competitions in national photography magazines at that time and had a fair amount of success winning cameras, computers and holidays.”
Brian continued with 35mm film until 2000 when Canon brought out the first digital SLR costing under £1,000. He bought one with the intention of using it just for his “arty” projects, but was so impressed by the results when he tried it for sports photography that he eventually sold his film cameras.
“I didn’t do much sport on film as I didn’t have a very high success rate and couldn’t afford to waste that much film,” he explains. “I was very impressed with this camera and by that time the price of digital had started to come down so I sold the film cameras and bought another DSLR, the Canon 20D.”
Brian produced a lot of “digital art” in the early 2000s and had a few exhibitions at the Erin Arts Centre and the Gallery at Tynwald Mills. “I still have a number of ‘unsold’ prints in the attic,” he adds.
At this time the Southern Photographic Society members were almost exclusively slide film users and the competitions reflected this, with just a few print competitions too. There was no room on the schedule for adding any form of digital photography so Brian and a few members decided to start up a new group within the club to concentrate solely on digital.
There was plenty of interest as the first meeting at the Cherry Orchard Hotel in 2005 attracted around 70 people, and Brian says that initially they wanted to take the club in a different direction to other clubs:
“We didn’t want to follow all the existing clubs so went down the route of instructional nights with demonstrations of digital manipulation, and nights for members to bring work in to show everyone.
“Unfortunately this ended up with the same few people doing all the demonstrations and displaying, so we thought we would try a competition to see if we could get some member participation.
“This proved very popular, so – although not what was planned for the club – we had no option but to go down the regular competition route. Eventually film died out and the original club folded with just the ‘digital’ group continuing as it is today.”
Having been a leading light for many years within local photography circles, more recently Brian has been dedicating most of his time to documenting various sporting events, especially the home fixtures of Rushen Football Club.
“I have photographed nearly every Rushen FC home match for the last 13 years, and nearly every Pitbike race for the last seven years and I like the idea that I am generating a photographic archive of these events for future generations.”
Earlier this season, Brian took part in an enjoyable club night presentation on sports photography, in which he showed some of his favourite football images and shared tips for capturing the action in different sports and environments.
We look forward to Brian’s continued involvement with the SPS and we are pleased that he is considering how best to help with the practical/instructional side of our club night schedule.
