We should have been spending yesterday at the Osprey Watchpoint at Kielder; conservation and engaging the public (particularly with birds of prey) are very close to our hearts and have occupied a lot of our spare time for the last few years. However, the weather on Friday was a long way from promising and I was tasked with checking the conditions and forecast first thing on Saturday and contacting all of the volunteers and the volunteer co-ordinator and making a decision about the viability of having 5 volunteers sitting at Kielder in the rain.
So…we found ourselves at a loose end and decided to have a trip into Newcastle. First stop was the Thomas Bewick exhibition at the Laing Art Gallery, followed by the Wildlife Photographer of the Year Exhibition at the Hancock Museum. The incredible detail of Bewick’s art was clearly revealed with the aid of magnifying glasses and you can only wonder at the tiny scale he was working at. The photography exhibition was a bit of a mixed bag; some images that were breathtaking, but quite a few that just left me cold. Photography deserves to be treated as an art form, and art should trigger emotion; maybe positive, maybe negative. I suppose all of the images must have touched something in the judges…