Clive Finlayson

Clive Finlayson was born in Gibraltar in 1955. He has been a field naturalist since a very young age and he took his love of nature to the professional level, studying zoology at Liverpool University. He later focused on his major interest group – birds – gaining a doctorate at Oxford University. Clive has always supported his research with his own photography, having started by developing his own images in black-and-white long before digital photography was even a dream in the horizon. Clive attributes his main strength in photography to be his intimate knowledge of the subjects. Before even taking a camera into the field he spends hundreds of hours studying the birds. Clive is a naturally impatient and restless person but all this is firmly shut away when it is time to photograph a bird. He then becomes the most patient and persistent of people and has been known to have spent over four years to obtain the perfect shot of a particular species. His favourite lens is a Nikkor 600mm and has developed his technique of photographing birds in flight while hand-holding this monster! The results speak for themselves.

Clive is also an author, of books on natural history and his other passion – the Neanderthals.