Camera Club

Sibley Camera Club is a group of people that are interested in photography.  We have meetings once a month, usually on the first Saturday, from 10 to 11:30 am.  We have a wide variety of members that use different types of cameras, from cell phones to DSLRs, from casual users to expert users.  We try to have a few outings a year — that can be day trips to weekend trips — to practice photography.  Our members are a diverse group and like to photograph a variety of subjects. To belong to the Camera Club, we ask that you pay your yearly Sibley membership donation and attend 1 meeting a year.  

Highlighted Member — William C. “Bill” Bynum    

I was born and raised in Midland. There isn’t a body of water a person could drown in within 100 miles. It is possibly the most unlikely place one can imagine finding a 16-year-old boy who will not only fall in love with the ocean but will focus his entire life, including choosing his mate, on the pure joy of sharing our pristine oceans with the most magnificent creatures on the planet.

I obtained my YMCA scuba diving certification from an ex-Navy diver in 1968 and began diving Texas lakes. A little more than a year later, a friend and I booked a trip to Freeport, Grand Bahama to scuba dive as a high school graduation trip. The dive shop had the underwater sled from the Ian Fleming movie “Thunderball” hanging from the ceiling! I rented a camera and took my first underwater images which I still have in an envelope.

It was then and there that I fell in love with the ocean. We also dove quite a few Florida springs as we dove our way down the Keys. We dove Pennekamp and saw the statue in 1969 and still remember it today. I met my first barracuda in those keys which swam with me for what seemed forever. His teeth shimmering in the sun absolutely terrified me!  Many years later in Raja, I routinely jumped in the middle of schools of hundreds just to get the picture from the inside!

I met my wife Carol in Cayman Brac in 1986. From 1987 through 1994 we booked liveaboards and on-island destinations from Galapagos to the Philippines including on-island Sipadan in 1992. In 1991 we received a comp trip on Tropical Princess and saw Indonesia, north of Biak, for the first time. We have been truly blessed and lucky along our diving journey with a lot of serendipity stirred in! From 2008-2013 we booked twenty-five 12-to-14-day Raja Ampat, PNG, and Banda Sea area cruises and continued until we left Indonesia altogether due to overcrowding.

We are now both focusing on land-based wildlife photography and are discovering the many wonders of our great State of Texas.