Celebrity Profile _ Peter Brown

        Peter is currently President of the Photographic Alliance of Great Britain. He is also Chairman of the PAGB Inter-Club Slide Championship, the National Audio Visual Championships and also the MCPF Centenary Committee and Organiser of the Midland Counties Photographic Federation Audio Visual Competitions.

        Peter's interest in photography started when he was a teenager, first with railways and then cycling. He still has on his computer desktop a railway picture which he took with the family's Box Brownie when he was 14. For his 18th birthday he received a camera with variable shutter and aperture settings, which took 127 film. This had a simple light "meter" where you dialled in details and it came up with the camera settings. Peter was a printer by trade and always worked for companies who sold print by quality and not price, therefore he saw a lot of pictures and having to match the colours correctly sparked off his interest more in photography.

        It was not until 1960 that he advanced from monochrome prints to taking colour slides with a Kodak camera. Peter made his first projector from a kit advertised in Amateur Photographer. He became interested in producing monochrome prints on his own and discussed these with two colleagues at work who were interested in photography. He went back to producing monochrome prints in 1966 and joined a night school class to advance his photography. His prints, which were on show at the end of year exhibition, were seen by the Secretary of Braunstone Photographic Society (now Leicester Forest Photographic Society) who wrote inviting him to join the society. This invitation he accepted in 1969.

        During 1973 the club introduced an Audio Visual Competition into its programme. Peter and his family had been on holiday to North Wales and he had photographed "The Great Little Trains of Wales" on slides. He produced a sound track on a second hand Phillips Reel-to-Reel recorder and produced his first Audio Visual sequence. He was immediately bitten by the bug and has pursued A-V ever since. Now we are into the digital medium, this provides new challenges with new computer programmes to master to produce an A-V. Peter still has the "Great Little Trains of Wales" which has been repulsed for Imatronic.

        Peter was a founder member of the Leicester Forest Audio-Visual Group, which broke away from its parent body in 1985. He was Chairman of the Group until 2002.

        Peter has used Minolta Cameras since 1964 when he started with an A5. He still has 2 XD7 bodies with six lenses, these were superb cameras, the first on the market with shutter, aperture and manual settings. He still uses them from time to time. The oldest body is about thirty years old. The metering system on these seems far better than on his later 7000i. Peter has never been an equipment fanatic.

        For his A-V work he started with two Kodak Carousel "S" projectors and a Purlock Duo-fade, a manual cross fade devise. He then bought an electronic dissolve unit, at that time there were many models to choose from and he chose the Animatic Convar. Whilst an excellent dissolve unit, the Imatronic unit was becoming the standard for serious A-V workers, he therefore had to change to Imatronic and re-pulse all of his tapes. At that time everything was produced on Reel to Reel machines.

        Peter eventually upgraded his Kodak Carousels to the 2000 series machines, which he still uses. He also changed to running the sequences from cassette tapes, however he now runs all his shows from a Mini Disc.

        Since Peter retired, which is over five years ago now, he has started to produce a few prints on the computer. He quite enjoys working with Photoshop, and finds it relaxing. He has almost stopped using slide film nowadays having gone digital, but he still thinks that slides take a lot of beating.

        Audio Visual is his main interest in photography, although during the past two years he has not had time to produce many, if any sequences, as they are very time consuming to work on.

        Peter does not have any personal dislikes as he enjoys all types of photography. He wishes he had time to "play" with some of the different methods of producing pictures, like stereo and pinhole camera images.

        Competitions are not really important to Peter as he is not very "competitions minded". He does enter A-V competitions and from time to time puts a few slides or prints in at the club, but not on a regular basis. Peter always takes what he personally likes and does not try to enter work to please the judges. However he does get a great deal of pleasure from organising competitions and seeing other people win.

        Peter has won a few pots and medals over the years, but probably the competition result which gave him the most satisfaction was the A-V he produced about his son's wedding. The complete wedding was fitted into the twelve minutes maximum time allowed. Someone suggested that he enter it in a Midlands competition and surprise, surprise it was awarded a "Highly Commended".

        The photographic moments which have given Peter the most joy are probably his Italian A-Vs. He worked over quite a few years to produce a whole evening's show covering many regions of Italy. He has given this now to a great variety of audiences and has been to several Italian Societies. These people really seem to enjoy his work, which pleases him a lot and makes it all seem worth while.

        Peter has never specialised in any particular subject matter, what ever appeals at the time then becomes his story line for the A-V. He has several projects that he is working on, but whether they will ever get finished is another matter. When his son was growing up, they both enjoyed about three years together going on innumerable train trips for enthusiasts. He took a tremendous amount of slides and still hopes to put them into an A-V as a tribute to all their trips together. He has sorted the slides prior to retiring but still has not made any further progress.

        He uses photography in conjunction with other hobbies and since he retired he has taken an interest in stained glass windows and has now been on four courses learning how to read and appreciate them, photography helps quite a bit here. Peter does not seem to have much time for anything else probably because he spends too much time doing administration work for our hobby.

        Peter does not have any long-term objectives which he wishes to achieve in photography. He has achieved ARPS and DPAGB status and is quite happy with that.

        He has no ambition to try for Fellowship or Master.

        Peter has now started to work in the digital A-V field. He has produced two sequences in the Pictures to Exe programme with the sound track completed in cool Edit Pro. His Audio Visual Group has been lucky in being granted a lottery award to enable them to purchase a Digital Royale, an expensive piece of equipment costing around £4,500. Therefore it has given them the opportunity to expand the digital side of their hobby.

        Peter is a man who has worked extremely hard for the benefit of other photographers. Anyone who has worked with him will know what an enthusiastic atmosphere he generates. We need more people with Peter's enthusiasm in our hobby of photography, long may he continue.