Meet the OUTLAW – Lester Woodward – NOPS Vice Chairman

Hi

Well I’ve enjoyed photography for as long as I can remember, I have to thank my late uncle Ken, who used me as a model and then introduced me to the magical world of black and white developing.  I carried on my love for post processing at Uni, they had a really professional lab that us students could use, using my first proper camera a canon T50.  I only dabbled with photography for a number of years until the dawn of the digital age, in the early days it was very disappointing  the image quality was rubbish, as some of my old 2 megabyte images show all too clearly.

Other than photography back in the mid 90’s I discovered the delights of backpacking, not the cold and windy Snowdonia type but the nice and warm south-east asian type, the trouble was after a number of trips I realized that my “snaps” didn’t really live up to what I had experienced.  So I dabbled a bit with improving my camera upto the giddy heights of a Lumix DMC-FZ20 bridge camera and messing about with early versions of editing software.   But where to go from there, I joined NOPS and what does that provide, lots and lots of inspiration (some of our members are a tad good!), great feedback and opening you up to new ideas (light painting and fire spinning to name but a couple).

So what do I do now, well I’ve packed in from the humdrum world of computer contracting, become an official “snowbird”, upgraded my kit twice canon 450 to 60D, (but still in search of the illusive full frame beasty) and spent way too many hours processing my shots, the advances in image processing software are just to interesting for me to resist.  But what a brilliant hobby, I’ve met loads of lovely people and travelled to some “bizarre” places in search of interesting shots (how else would you end up on top of a disused mine tip in the middle of a cold night in Burnley taking images of flying saucers!).

So other than photography, well its camping, backpacking, growing strange veg down the allotment and painting (artistic dabbles and walls!).

You can follow my efforts on flickr my stream http://www.flickr.com/photos/52777349@N08/  or  http://www.flickr.com/photos/lesterlester1/

Or facebook me lesterwoodward@hotmail.co.uk

 

cheers

 

Lester