Hi Bruce
I attended Fri/Sat/Sun.
Highlights for me were
1. Assisting Jill Wilson in the am & pm tours of WTP by providing transport and a permit: a chance to repay the great hospitality from my previous two DPITB experiences where "locals" ferried me and others around.
2. Sighting on the Friday afternoon tour at WTP near Kirk Point on the rocks on a falling tide, in the one field of a spotting scope, (I think thanks here to Craig from Geelong Naturalists) six species of term. From memory (but don't quote me) they were fairy tern, little tern, common tern, whiskered tern, white-winged black tern and crested tern. Someone will probably correct me on the species: my tern identification is a work in progress!! And because I was driving/guiding I didn't do any photography and have no image to check!
3. The great presentations from members on a wide variety of bird photography subjects, and esp the personal insights from Kim Wormald and Georgina Steyler.
4. The ethics presentation by Georgina Steyler and the reinforcement by other speakers of these. I now understand the background and am on board with them.
5. The insights and presentation of the 2015 winner of the Tom Oliver Award, Brian O'Leary, was very informative and entertaining: but I do think some of his 'live baiting' with mealworms and 'earth' worms in our current BLP environment of high ethical standards needs to be addressed. This is not to be taken as a criticism of Brian, but just a call that we, Birdlife Photography, need to look at our view on ethics in this general area of feeding birds and esp with live baits. The latter is one of the reasons as to why I'm not a game fisherman any more.
6. Finally I attended the last two sessions of the Canon Collective presentations by Jay Collier (?). Because of clashing other presentations, i missed the earlier part of his sessions. For me his presentation was very confident, polished and full of great insights into bird photography with the emphasis on Canon users...but Nikon users would have gained insights also. It would be great if his notes could be circulated with the notes that are to be circulated from the other speakers.
Apologies to the presenters (esp Keith, Ian, et al) not mentioned, but Bruce asked for the highlights........you were all great.
Cheers AB