Photography club

Having your life flash before your eyes is usually accompanied by a life changing or even life ending event!

Fortunately all Dr Ross Mackenzie has to do is switch on his computer and select a slideshow of the 2,400 and rising images he has added to daily since 2004.

Ross, Learning and Teaching Systems Manager in Learning and Teaching Solutions at Walton Hall, is never without his camera nor, it seems, his passport.

He has taken pictures on six of the seven continents and globetrotting figures high in his photo journal. Not that the daily shot has to be spectacular or exotic.

“I can be driving in to work from Oxford and will see something to photograph and stop on the way home,” said the 50-year-old.

Ross has been interested in photography since a teenager – there is photographic evidence of him with a camera around his neck in 1971 in the Alps. The photo journal was kicked off on Christmas Eve, 2004 not long after he got his first digital camera and it was intended to stop after a year.

The first image was of an outside art installation at the OU and shots around the campus have figured in the collection along with punts on the Thames at Oxford, ancient ruins in Iran, penguins in the Falklands and polar bears in the Arctic along with family moments and holidays and often the Shetland Islands.

Ross said the daily picture habit has improved his photographic skills.

“It has helped my observation as well as telling me where I have been and even what mood I have been in. That can mean a picture of raindrops pelting a window or sunny blue skies,” he said. 

Ross prefers a ‘real’ camera to taking pictures with a mobile phone because of the ability to shape the image they give him. He uses Nikon Digital SLRs.

Just over a year ago he began posting his shots on the website blipfoto which shares daily photos from around the world and he has his own blog (here) with links to his photos on Flickr and Picasa.

And where will it all end? No place or time soon judging by his upcoming travel plans, though Africa his continent still to do, will have to wait for a while. This winter he is off to Sri Lanka and then Chile, the Falkland Islands and South Georgia.

“I hope to photograph elephants - and elephant seals,” said Ross. 

In June 2010 Ross visited Svalbard in the Norwegian Spitzbergen Islands and the scene of the recent fatal attack by a polar bear on a British youth expedition.

He says: “The recent Svalbard story was a reminder that the safer way (there isn’t a completely risk-free way)  to see polar bears is by boat and with an armed escort.

"We also had one of the world experts on polar bears with us ensuring we didn’t get close enough to endanger us or them."

"The bears on Svalbard are really desperate for food  - my image from last year was of an adult bear plus a rather scrawny cub pulling rotten meat off a year old submerged whale carcass," he said.

Check out his blog entry for the Svalbard trip here .