About Michael Shaw

Michael joined Heswall Photographic Society in 1970, and held the office of President from 1976 to 1977. In 1981 he gained his Associateship of the Royal Photographic Society. He had also been a member of the prestigious Liverpool Amateur Photographic Association, believed to be one of the oldest Photographic Societies in the country. His main photographic interest was landscape photography which he combined with his love of hill walking particularly in Snowdonia, and the Lake District which apparently his was still doing up to the age of 80. During National Service in the Army in Germany (with the rank of Captain) he used his leave to travel to the mountainous regions, building up a wonderful collection of mountain landscapes. He was a meticulous worker with very characteristic style: his much-admired monochrome prints were mounted on silver covered mounting board. The prints were made using a Gnome enlarger which his parents had given him for his 21st birthday and which he continued to use thereafter. Mike was also a keen colour slide worker, and produced prize winning colour prints too. Later on, he embraced digital photography, mainly for digitising his image collection which he did by projecting his slides onto a screen, in a darkened room, and photographing the image produced with a digital camera. In addition, he was known proudly to share mobile phone images he had made while walking to Society meetings and was also an ardent enthusiast of creating audio-visual presentations of his images.

Mike went to Liverpool University where he qualified in Dentistry. He was a dentist within the Liverpool hospital service and part of his career was spent as Children’s Dentist with Birkenhead Corporation. He also worked for the NHS authority which priced the cost of dental treatments. No doubt he was served well in this profession by his reputation for kindness and for being intelligent, ultra-polite and a true gentleman. Certainly, all his fellow Society members recognised all those qualities in him and he was a very popular colleague both with those who had known him many years and those who had only met him more recently.

Mike was a very cultured man who loved classical music and until recently was a regular patron of Royal Liverpool Philharmonic concerts. He was a man of great faith, and a regular attender at St Peters Church, Heswall. He once commented to a fellow photographer that “photography was all about the light”. In sharing that quote another friend said that “As a quietly religious man, that was also probably Mike’s philosophy of life too”.

Sadly, Michael passed away in 2020.