This evening we were very privileged to have Vanda Ralevska who gave us a talk entitled ‘Landscape Photography’, a very ordinary title for an extraordinarily evening full of many Ordinary things photographed Extraordinarily.
Vanda was born in Czechoslovakia in a very industrial and mining area which was dirty, noisy and smelly to use her own words. There was music in her home, but no art as such. However there was a family film camera which Vanda, when very young, opened with a film in it and was not popular! Later, when she was in her early ‘teens, her Father gave her her first camera, which she still has as a reminder of him. This marked the start of a remarkable journey.
Vanda studied I.T. and came to the UK to go to university. She now works as a programmer in London and calls England her home, She fell in love with it starting with her first sight of the 'White Cliffs' coming to England for the first time.
The whole evening was really a story of her life in pictures with lots of quotes from poets and other famous people to kick off her illustration of the topics and subjects which she photographs.
It became very obvious almost from the start that Vanda is a very dedicated and passionate photographer, which comes shining through in her images time after time. Vanda has lots of favourite subjects and is never happier than when photographing in the rain. (I suspect that nobody in our club shares that passion - including me!). Vanda did however say that her partner Martin is sometimes available to hold the umbrella. We saw brilliant images taken of reflections from wet pavements and puddles. One of our older members piped up ”excuse me but a lot of these pictures seem to be upside-down”, to which Wanda replied “that’s because they are”! This was to make figures in the reflections the right way up.
A lot of Vanda’s images are minimalistic with just one back-lit leaf for instance, or a part of a flower or a tiny cloud in landscape.
She does a lot of hiking with Martin and is very happy to be out climbing mountains, and out in the wilds of Scotland and lots and lots of other places throughout the UK. She now has made an arrangement with her company allowing her to work four days a week and thus has the other three available to pursue her photography.
Amongst her favourite subjects is the Sea and one of my favourite images of the evening was a seascape with a large wave just breaking and the wind blowing spray off the top of it.
At one point in her photographic career, she decided to try her hand at being professional doing portrait work, and we saw some examples of this. However, doing this type of photography did not suit Vanda as she was having to please other people and not herself.
Vanda walks along the Embankment going to work and we saw several of her pictures taken there. A favourite time of day is sunrise (and sunset) and here again one picture was my very favourite image. It was the very best picture that I have seen of the river of poppies (entitled 'Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red’) taken at the Tower of London. The sky was blood red casting its light on the installation. To get the shot that she wanted, Vanda visited the Tower four mornings before dawn to get it right. Now that is devotion and dedication! There was another reason, apart from it being an outstanding image, that it meant so much to me, as I bought one of those poppies in memory of my Uncle Douglas who was killed aged 19 in Northern Italy three weeks before the end of the war in 1918. In this image there was an explosion of colour.
As one of our members remarked, there was not one mention of an ”f” stop or any other technical stuff, just one superb image after another.
As Chris West said whilst thanking Vanda for a truly enjoyable evening, it was' inspirational'.