The online presence of Tim Collier. Photographer, course leader, lecturer and blogger.
The Elvis festival began in 2004 from fairly small beginnings but is now it’s one of the largest in the world attracting Elvis’s from all over the globe. It has become something of an essential player in the local economy as well, worth close to seven million pounds but remains a tad surreal when you find yourself listening to a pretty good Elvis playing in a fish and chip shop!
A group of students on our new photojournalism course at the University of South Wales covered the Elvis festival at Porthcawl this weekend and their work was showcased on BBC Wales news online.
The new academic year has started and our first year students are involved in a number of photography shoots during their induction week. Today saw a collaboration between the music and photography courses that are run at the Atrium.
A series of images taken on the river Taff. It doesn’t matter what your working with there’s always a real feeling of excitement when your around any activity and the aim is to find the one shot when it all comes together.
I finally managed to catch up with a bird that has been a little elusive for me over the years, the only other sighting I had was at Dinas some four years ago and that could only be described as a glimpse.
The scheduled August walk had to be cancelled due, would you believe, to bad weather! So a rather quickly arranged date was agreed – we needed and still need to  compile enough images that place the walks into a context and time is running out.
The main reason for visiting Northumberland was to see my brother’s exhibition, The Resilience of the Wild, at the Customs House in South Shields.
I encountered an unusual space the other day, one that’s around us as an island everywhere but curiously one that very few experience.
On a recent visit to Formby Point it was good to see that the red squirrels are recovering well. In recent years they were virtually wiped out here by the squirrel pox, a disease carried by the non indigenous grey squirrel.
Falmouth Press and Editorial final year degree show, Arvor, is on at the moment and over the weekend I went down to have a look. My daughter graduates from the course this year and has been involved in the organisation of the event.
A trip up to  RSPB Dinas, and a new CCW reserve for me yesterday, proved very productive with regards to the expected species, although the woods did seem a little quiet for this time of year than I remember from previous seasons. I’m wondering if this has anything to do with the lateness of spring in general?
The new calendar for 2014 is finally on its way! (check out the 2012 one here – 2013 we missed due to my illness!) We’ve already cancelled two dates due to very unseasonal weather but today we were lucky and the weather was ideal for the work we had planned.
The cuckoo is a remarkable bird and has always had a special relationship with spring. Since the 1980’s they have declined by 65% and I certainly remember them in places that they have long since gone. Why, is a bit of a mystery.
Surely a case of crossing the line with this construction of an egret and a frog by Bryan Patrick.
I was recently asked to participate in a transatlantic conference with Rochester Institute of Technology in New York.
A run up to Dinas, always a favourite haunt, and a good walk around the ‘rock’ past Twm Sion Cati’s cave in still very cold conditions produced some really fine icicles and ice sculptures. It was difficult to get a sense of the beauty through photographs and I felt dissatisfied when I left them, never an easy thing to do, and this disappointment was confirmed when I downloaded the images.
Today I ran a training day for the Countryside Wardens Rangers (Thanks for the correction Jon) at Caerphilly County Council. Some time back they asked me to recommend a camera that would suit their needs and after some research I came up with what I felt would meet the brief.
A few more images in a way that I’ve been working lately. I’m putting them into a warm toned  black and white and again looking a the wider aspect of the birds in relationship to their habitat.
I’ve posted a new essay in the ‘Birds Eloquent’ section of the web site that looks at a telling incident at Slimbrigde with a rare warbler and a common wood-pigeon – check it out here.