Drinks 6.30pm , lecture tickets on sale from 6.30pm lecture starts 7.30pm

HK$100 members HK$150 Non members

No pre booking required

Paul Mckenzie lectures on "Wild Encounters Around the Globe", the story of some of his fascinating adventures as a photographer.  The focus of Mr Mckenzie's talk is the images he has shot in four diverse locations, the Midway Atoll, the Great Rift Valley, the seas around French Polynesia and the Serengeti, together with the stories which go with those pictures.  His lecture is part natural history, part conservation and part photographic tips, but mostly it focusses on the adventures behind the taking of the photos.

Mr Mckenzie's talk starts with the seabirds of Midway Atoll.  Midway was vacated as a US naval base in 1996 and is today home to more than two million seabirds including close to a million Laysan and Black-Footed Albatrosses, comprising the bulk of the global populations for both species.  Difficult to reach due its extreme remoteness and visitor restrictions, Mr Mckenzie has recently returned from his sixth visit to the Atoll.  Midway is a truly unique destination with staggering densities of seabirds, the majority of which have almost no fear of humans.

To his next continent, Mr Mckenzie talks of the Flamingos of East Africa's Great Rift Valley   The soda lakes of East Africa are home to the majority of the world's populations of flamingos.  Living in environments that are hostile to most other animal species, flamingos are gregarious and highly social creatures.  Mr Mckenzie has spent many hours photographing the flamingos and their environment from an open-sided light aircraft.  He has also endured often extreme discomfort to photograph them at eye level from the shores of some of the more remotely located lakes.

Taking the audience the world's oceans, he  talks of the Grouper aggregations and spawnings of French Polynesia.  While diving near an isolated atoll in 2009, Mr Mckenzie stumbled upon a natural history occurrence that has been witnessed by very few, an aggregation of thousands of spawning Camouflage Groupers with huge concentrations of attendant Surgeonfish, Fusiliers and Sharks.  Mr Mckenzie revised the site in 2010 to view the event again and is hoping for more success when he goes again in a few months.

Mr Mckenzie is also an expert on the wildlife of the Mara/Serengeti ecosystem in East Africa.  He has visited this region more than 30 times over the last fifteen years.  Nowhere on the planet has the density of game, the degree of predation and the range of animal behaviour that is seen in the Mara/Serengeti. Mr Mckenzie's talk and images focus on the annual Wildebeest migration and the various obstacles and predators that the herds encounter on their circuitous journey.  
 
Paul Mckenzie's has been a HK resident for over 40 years.  He read economics and geography at Trinity College, Dublin.  From 1987 he worked in the finance industry in Hong Kong as an equity research analyst.  Since 2009, he has switched to a part time role to allow him more time to concentrate on photography.  Mr Mckenzie began photographing as a teenager but his passion was ignited in the early 1990s when he purchased an underwater camera. In 1997, he photographed his first safari in East Africa and since then has travelled extensively to many remote corners of the globe to photograph wildlife.

Mr Mckenzie's focus is on capturing animal behaviour and in showing animals within the context of their environments. The aesthetics of the image, shaped by a combination of light, composition and the background are the critical elements of his genre. Today he is a photographer whose images have been published widely and used by such corporations as Microsoft, Patagonia, Viacom, Discovery Channel and the World Wildlife Fund.  In 2011, two of his images received awards in the prestigious "Nature's Best" photo competition.  These are currently on display in the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington.