Bob Webzell ARPS EFIAP
A former President of Brighton and Hove Camera Club, Bob lectures and judges in photography across Southern England and competes internationally. Following a London-based career in university lecturing and examining, Bob decided to retire early, only to get elected onto his Parish Council which he has Chaired for 6 of the past 8 years. Among his duties as Council Chair was the management of Beacon Hill Nature Reserve, at Rottingdean, with its famous windmill, Bob successfully enlarged the Reserve by 45% in his time in charge.
A slide worker before going digital in 2005, Bob’s photographic interests are quite catholic, and he is as happy photographing street children in troubled cities, as he is photographing a lark ascending on Beacon Hill. (Yes, that’s where Vaughan Williams wrote it)
Bob co-founded the charity Serian UK and donated all of the proceeds of his bi-annual one-man exhibitions based upon frequent return visits, and camera club lecturing and judging, to help build a secondary school in remote Maasailands in Northern Tanzania. In 2004 Bob was made an Elder of the Maasai Community in Eluwai, Tanzania, one of the greatest honours that the Maasai People can bestow, and one of which he is immensely proud to have received. Serian UK’s work in Tanzania is now completed but Bob and other Trustees are launching the African Flame charity to seed-fund small scale business ventures, and offer management planning, for women and unemployed young adults in Sub-Saharan Africa’s most deprived communities.
Africa is clearly in Bob’s blood, his health-teaching career took him to West Africa in the late 80’s where he effectively taught himself photography, and where he compiled a RPS LRPS panel even before joining his first camera club. And now having retired a second time Bob returns to his first love of nature and wildlife photography whenever he has the opportunity to. Locally he uses Beacon Hill and the farm on the South Downs where his horse is stabled, but he loves returning to West and East Africa; birds in flight is his current photo-obsession, which reflects in his competition entries and website:
Web site: www.webzell.co.uk
