The next meeting is November 25th 6:30 social and 7:00 meeting start. There is a new location. It will be at Goins Auditorium at Pellissippi State Technical Community College. Click here for directions.

Our presenter this month is Clay Thurston.  Clay is a charter member of SANP and is well known to most of the membership.  He will be presenting “Backyard Photography”, a program of photographs all taken within 10 feet of his house in West Knoxville.  This program will go into both the “how to and how not to” take good backyard nature photographs.  This program is the rewarding result of spending many hours in a blind watching, laughing at, and photographing the creatures that ventured into his backyard.

BIO: Thirty years ago, Knoxville photographer Clay Thurston took his first 35mm photograph as a favor to his father-in-law who wanted a picture of two frost-laden trees but didn't want to get out of the house and into the cold.  "When I saw the beauty I had recorded on that piece of film, I was hooked!  I bought my first `real' camera, a Petri, and began reading and photographing everything," Clay says. 

Not much has changed, except the equipment.  The passion for photography remains, and learning through reading and experimenting continues.  The Petri is long gone, as are quite a few other cameras.  Now Clay records most of his images with lenses from 12mm to 600mm mounted on Nikon equipment(film and digital).

As a retired physical education teacher with Oak Ridge Schools, Clay now pursues photography full time.  He uses his time to travel and photograph the beauty and diversity of the land, its wildlife and its people.  He has traveled extensively in the continental U.S. and Alaska.  His foreign travels include Africa, Switzerland, Japan, Costa Rica, Ecuador and the Galapagos Islands, Canada, and Mexico.  Wherever he travels, his experience in hiking, canoeing, climbing, rappelling, and caving enhance opportunities to record the pristine beauty of remote areas.

Clay's educational training and photographic skills are a natural blend for the workshops and field trips he conducts throughout the year, both in photography and in matting and framing.  He has served as sponsor of photography clubs for both junior and senior high school students.  Clay competes regularly in photo contests, winning top honors in many local and regional competitions.  His work has appeared in several nationally distributed magazines.  Clay also exhibits his work at several art shows and crafts fairs in the southeast and will now be expanding to other parts of the country.

In 2005 he was the photographer chosen to provide the photographs (53) for the Calendar/Journal published each year by Upper Room Books.  And this past February he was one of only 17 nature photographers in North America to present a short slide program to the North American Nature Photographers Association (NANPA).

A native of Sanford, Maine, Clay came to East Tennessee via Texas where he completed his M.S. degree at Sam Houston State University before enrolling at UTK for post-graduate work.  Clay now shares his life and photography with his wife Bobbie Crews.  Clay says: “Even though our art takes us in different directions, we both seem to grow from each others abilities”.

 

Workshops and field trips are a great way for SANP members to share their photographic knowledge with others. If you have a location in mind and wish to share it with others as a group or would like to share your photographic secrets with with a workshop contact Brad Cottrell. Anyone can suggest or lead a workshop or field trip.