TOPSHAM

Freelance photographer Heather Perry will present a slide talk entitled “Works in Progress” for First Light Camera Club on Feb. 11 from 6:30-8:30 p.m. at the Topsham Medical Building, 4 Horton Place in Topsham. The public is invited to attend. The event is free for members of FLCC and $10 for guests. Folks are encouraged to join the Club to support its programming at a cost of $35 per year and to take advantage of interesting speakers and tech nights.

Perry’s talk will address her photographic history, some of her recent creative projects and her great passion — underwater work. Her clients have included Colby Magazine, Boston Globe, Le Monde, Nature Conservancy, Outside, New York Times, Smithsonian, Bowdoin Magazine and National Geographic.

Her cover story on open water swimming in Maine appeared in the November/December 2015 issue of Maine Boats, Homes and Harbors, and her photographs of eels will appear in an upcoming issue of the same publication.

As a young girl, Perry was influenced by images of Jacques Cousteau and wanted to become a deep sea diver. She also swam competitively as early as age eight. She later became a marine naturalist and started scuba diving. It was while working for an aquarium that she found a camera in a closet one day, started using it, and fell in love with it.

“And I’m still at it today,” Perry said. Perry still swims competitively and, for five weeks of each year, leads guided open water swim tours in tropical locations — the British Virgin Islands, the Mediterranean coast of Turkey, and Hawaii. She does the tours for a local company, SwimVacation out of Bath, which she runs with her business partner Hopper McDonough. In this capacity, she guides swimming activities and does all the photographic work.

Although she photographed aquatic life in the past, her true passion is photographing people in the water. “Being underwater is my passion,” said Perry. “It is the place where I am most comfortable on earth.”

To broaden her scope of photographic offerings, Perry shoots portraits and lifestyle themes. Even though she is shooting “all the time,” she likes to push her creativity by giving herself assignments that stimulate and challenge her work.

Recently, she embarked on photographing “Kids in the Hood,” a ten-year project of photographing three neighborhood children, one of which is her son, 365 days of the year. She photographs for one solid year, then takes a year off and continues in this way for ten years. She started when the kids were six and seven years old; now they are 9 and 10. Her intention is to document their lives in as creative a way possible and to post images to social media every day. Her audience now expects to see daily images and she feels that “holds (her) accountable.”

See more of her work at heatherperryphoto.com, swimvacation.com, on Instagram under “heathfish,” and at the “talent page” of natgeocreative.com.

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