COLWYN Bay is to host a photography festival including a range of exhibitions and guest speakers this weekend.

The Northern Eye Photography Festival, a collaboration between the Oriel Colwyn gallery and Aberystwyth's The Eye Festival, will take place on October 9 and 10 in the Theatr Colwyn building, the oldest working theatre in Wales and home of Oriel Colwyn.

The biennial festival is returning for its third edition, having enjoyed great success previously in both 2017 and 2019.

In total, seven speakers, including Craig Easton (2021 photographer of the year at the SONY World Photography Awards) and Alys Tomlinson (winner of the Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize 2020), will be at the festival, as well as 15 exhibitions on display.

Saturday’s schedule also includes presentations of work from lesser-known artists entitled ‘Pechakucha’, before finishing with a curry night.

Tickets are priced at £40 for the entire weekend, with the additional option of watching the festival’s events virtually on a live stream (though, they are only available to be watched live, rather than on playback at a later date or time).

Paul Sampson, festival director and Oriel Colwyn curator, said: “The festival itself centres around this weekend, but all around Colwyn Bay for the whole of October (Fringe Festival), there are all of these pop-up exhibitions, which are all free to view.

“So, if you don’t want to come to the speakers’ weekend, you can still see all of this stuff around Colwyn Bay.

“Ticket sales have been going really well. There’s social distancing if you want to within the theatre and there are face masks in there, so it’s following COVID rules.

“It opens up everything by putting it online. That’s been quite popular because it’s allowed us to reach out further than Colwyn Bay – we’ve got a couple from America, and one from Japan at the moment.

“It helps Oriel Colwyn and just brings people back out, doing things again in a safe way.

“Oriel Colwyn has been pottering along during the pandemic, so we’ve kept going, but we just recognise that it’s been a really tough 18 months for everybody, so we lowered the price of this year’s festival and made sure that people can still afford to come.

“It’s a huge, stellar lineup; to have it in Colwyn Bay is just phenomenal.”

To book your ticket for this weekend’s festival, visit: www.theatrcolwyn.ticketsolve.com/shows/1173612073.

Further information regarding the schedule can be found at: www.northerneyefestival.co.uk/speakers-schedule.