There’s an upcoming event in Llanfairfechan, the aptly-named Llanfairfechan Arts Week, beginning on 8 August 2026. It will showcase the myriad of creative endeavours that the good folk of Llanfairfechan occupy themselves with. The skill and enthusiasm with which they do this never ceases to amaze and impress me.
Photography being one of the creative disciplines, I committed to produce an exhibition of the work of the Llanfairfechan Photography Challenge Group that I administer on Facebook. The group has been running for about seven years and has well over 500 members, although those actively submitting photos for the group’s weekly themed challenges are much fewer than that. Thousands of images have been submitted over the years, many of which are to a remarkably high standard, which is testament to the skills of our local photography community.
The invitation to take part in the exhibition attracted entries from 11 members, who submitted about 130 images in total.
Straightforward enough you’d imagine, but many of the files that I received were way too small and low-res to show on a huge screen, so they had to be identified and the senders invited to resubmit them.
Sequencing the images into a slideshow, saving to a .PDF file and converting it to .MP4 format all took time, especially as the pagination would mysteriously go awry when saving it, causing many re-edits. I took the final edit to the town hall to test the slideshow on the mahoosive screen and it looks OK, thankfully.
There’s also an Art Trail in the shop windows around the village. One image from each of the participating photographers will be included in this exhibition. My Canon Pixma Pro 10 printer came in useful for this, enabling me to print at exhibition quality, up to A3+. The exhibition organisers will mount the pictures, and each photographer will receive their image at the the end of the exhibition.
Concurrently with this exercise, I undertook to produce a book containing the images from an exhibition held in Llanfairfechan Library of informal portraits by a good friend and excellent photographer, Lloyd Jones.
Lloyd passed away earlier this year and, with his family’s kind consent and cooperation, I produced a book of the exhibition as a tribute to the all-round good egg that was Lloyd.
The book was completed and printed by Mixam, in time to coincide with the re-showing of Lloyd’s exhibition as part of the aforementioned Arts Week, where it’ll be on sale to raise funds for a couple of local charities.
Having experienced the stress of curating these two projects, I can say with some certainty that I won’t be taking it up with any regularity in future!
I’m glad they’re finished, to be honest, so that I can get back to concentrating on my own photography. I’ve been planning to put a book and/or zine of my own work together for some time, but my brain needs a bit of a break before I tackle either of those.