Background
Stephen Neale Dalton was born 1937. His father, a Royal Air Force officer.
naturalist Photographer author
Stephen Neale Dalton was born 1937. His father, a Royal Air Force officer.
In the early 1960s he took a full-time photography diploma at London’s Regent Street Polytechnic.
Dalton started his work on insect photography in the early 1970s, before infrared beams or lasers, using a custom-made arrangement of lenses and mirrors, and a custom-made high-speed shutter. Working with an electronics specialist he devised a flash tube/capacitor combination which provided the required combination of high-power flash and extremely short flash duration. After two years of experimentation he was able for the first time to obtain sharp photographs of insects in flight.
Dalton's first full-colour book, Borne on the Wind (1975) took nature photography into new realms, with photographs that showed for the first time insects captured in free flight.
He was the subject of a BBC television documentary, “The World About Us," in 1978.
He is a Fellow of the Institute of Incorporated Photographers, won both an Honorary Fellowship and a Silver Progress Medal from London's Royal Photographic Society in 1978.