Meg Rutherford ceased illustrating professionally at the age of 69. In that year she wrote a note to herself ”If I am to have any life at all, I’ve got to be free of illustration to be able to spend my ‘energies on (stained) glass and gardening etc”’. Thus she made her decision to cease professional ‘Illustrating work.

“Now I have taken to the camera, which gives me back all the pleasure of design ‘and colour but now with freedom of subject and no deadlines”. “Not long after abandoning illustrating I began using the macro lens in the garden. Almost all my photographs are taken there in natural ‘daylight.With the camera, I am now able to go beyond ‘what I was trying to achieve in my illustrations and take minute detail amid large soft swathes of ‘colour”.

What she did not mention is that she did not use a tripod. To understand her steadiness, just look at the photograph of a house fly or of the green Cricket. All the photographs are straight off the camera without the use of digital manipulation but she did enlarge and sometimes crop. Meg Rutherford started with a single lens reflect film camera, but later changed to a digital body.

With her excellent observational skills it seems likely that Meg would had further success with a camera had illness and death not intervened relatively soon after she took to the camera.