Stroud based photographer Barbara Manzi-Fe has gained renown for her exquisite detailed portraits of flora and fauna.

Now she switched her lens from micro to wide-angled and taken in the whole scenery, paying attention to the sun rays and rain clouds. Bev Hawes discovers how she found her muse.
Talented photographer Barbara Manzi-Fe has widened her view of nature  for her latest exhibition.

Earlier this year Barbara launched her first solo display with close up pictures showing the intricate beauty of flowers.

New Exhibition features  unique close-up images of plant life as even the keenest gardener rarely sees it.
By Bev Hawes

Photographer who rises at dawn to capture first flush of flower's beauty.

The intricate  beauty  of flowers with the finest detail of petals opening up under the sun's morning rays has been captured by a talented photographer.
Now Barbara Manzi-Fe's work is to be featured in her first solo exhibition which opens to-day in the West. The 59 year old captures the amazing close-ups by positioning her lens just a few inches from her subject.

Barbara branches back into photos with flower show

Barbara Manzi-Fe, the Stroud based photographic artist, has an exhibition of her magnified flowers and landscape opening at the Stroud Subsciption Room this weekend.

Manzi-Fe studied photography in London but gave it up to become a psychotherapist.

She was persuaded to return to photography, by fellow artist Jamie Vans, for the Stroud Visual Arts Festival's Open Studios.

Barbara Manzi-Fe's garden in  the Cotswolds is a scene of high drama. It might be a raindrop poised on the cusp of petal, a fly clinging to a pollen encrusted stamen or the lush curve of a velveteen petal.

This is the secret world of hidden beauty Barbara has revealed through photography.

A former psychotherapist Barbara is skilled at helping people explore their inner emotions. But her photographs have revealed her skills at a different type of exploration.

Heavy Petal

Barbara Manzi-Fe's photos of flowers make you feel as if summer is already here. Folio looks through the lens of this local artist.

A keen gardener, as well as a photographer, Barbara Manzi-Fe doesn't just see all that hard work that needs to be done in the garden.  Using natural lighting and differential focusing, with a high-quality close-up lens, her images evoke the magical, fresh vibrancy of each individual flower, each of her portraits the result of careful studied observation.

Western Daily Press - Wednesday, April 10^th, 2002

Flower Powers

Variety is the spice for a psychotherapist who turned photographer, writes Suzanne Savill

Life can work out in unexpected ways. Take Barbara Manzi-Fe - she worked in fashion photography, and then became a psychotherapist.

But after 17 years working in psychotherapy she has made a fresh impact working as a photographer specialising in detailed studies of flowers.

Barbara began to take pictures of flowers as a hobby and only exhibited her work for the first time last year after encouragement by an artist friend who spotted some of her work hanging at her 17^th century farmhouse home near Stroud in Gloucestershire.

When you look at your flower bed, what do you see? Masses of colour? Contrasts ­ heights, forms, shades? Or do you, like most gardeners, seeweeds and jobs to be done? I¹m certain that few of us see what Countryside member Barbara Manzi Fe sees.

Her photographer¹s eye takes in the colour and all the rest of it and because she is a keen gardener as well as a photographer, she probably sees the weeds and the jobs too ­ but she looks for something else. Drama. Drama of a sort that comes from a combination of lighting, differential focusing and a high quality macro (close up) lens.