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Alice Pownall-Gray

Alice Photographing Seals in ScotlandAbout Alice

Alice has been an oil painter since she was six years old. She grew up in Old Saybrook, Connecticut, where she would spend hours as a child in the woods, wetlands and marshes near to her home carefully observing nature with her sketch pad, crayons and brushes. From the hours of her painting, Alice grew to have a deep connection to the creatures that she painted, from field mice, to foxes, to snakes to frogs, to doves and to Osprey, to Lily ponds to breaking waves. Alice was always fascinated by clouds and how their shadows would play on the landscape she was painting. Later in her life Alice began to take photography seriously, finding that her training as an oil painter made her quick to understand composition and color when using a digital camera. But it has taken Alice a number of years to become sophisticated in modern digital camera technology and how to best utilize the various and often contradictory qualities of today’s competing camera systems, lens, filters and tripods. Nowadays, Alice knows that to truly capture a beautiful landscape requires a slow and cumbersome Fuji Medium Format 100MB Camera while she must switch to her rapid-fire Canon 1DX mounted with her trusted Canon EF 800mm lens, if she is going to capture a Swan washing itself at sunset. But this technological expertise did not come easily to Alice, and she has worked hard to learn how to select the best technological tools for the particular picture she is trying to create. Over the last four years Alice has become expert in combining still photography with “oil painting”, only using digital rather than physical brushes, which has taken her full circle, back to her natural painting skills, honed from her childhood years sketching the wildlife of the Connecticut shoreline. Alice now travels with her husband Dickon to some of the most rugged and remote areas of the world to capture nature as a team.