THE pressure is on. Some months ago I offered to do a talk to the Swindon Society about local photographer Denis Bird, and you could say my Bird talk has come home to roost, because I have to deliver it on Wednesday and I am remembering the Swindon Society is a tough gig.

As you can imagine, they know their stuff. When they get together - and they meet to hear a talk at Goddard Park School on the second Wednesday of every month (7.30pm) between autumn and spring - their combined knowledge of local history is awesome. It’s difficult to tell them anything they don’t know, or show them a photograph they have never seen before. And when your subject is the work of someone a few of them actually knew - because Denis Bird was one of the founders of the society - you have well and truly made a rod for your own back.

These days you can find a lot of old pictures of Swindon flying around on the internet, and while it is easy to share them, the hard work of archiving many of them has been done by the dedicated volunteers of the Swindon Society.

If it wasn’t for their efforts, many of those photographs would be long gone.

The society was formed more than 40 years ago, and they have now amassed a huge archive that runs into tens of thousands of photographs.

Recent research - appropriately by a former chairman of the Swindon Society, Paul Williams - has revealed that the number of professional photographers working in Swindon in the past far exceeded the number you would expect for a town of its size, suggesting that photography was a craze that lasted for generations here.

Add to the professionals the hundreds of amateurs who were also inspired to take up photography as a hobby, even though cameras were expensive then, and processing even more so, and you can see why the archives are so vast.

Denis Bird’s work stands out because while the sheer volume of old photographs of Swindon is surprising, and Denis himself added many thousands between the 1940s and his death in 2001, sometimes it is more about quality than quantity. He was never a professional, but he certainly knew what made a good photograph. In short: he was a true artist.

And, fortunately just in time for the talk this week, I have worked out another reason why his photos were so good. A hundred years ago, photos rarely captured people in their true light. Most of them, including all those portraits of First World War soldiers, were posed in studios, so they all look starchy. Or we see people gathered on street corners to gawp at the strange bloke capturing street scenes with of those new-fangled camera.

Today we’ve gone too far the other way, with every Tom, Dick and Harry having a phone camera that they are all too keen to whip out without warning and point at anything and anybody, including themselves. To future generations the millions of (mostly unprinted) photos we leave behind are going to seem like a lot of background noise.

Exactly half-way between the two extremes, 50 years ago, and in his heyday, was Denis Bird. Back then there were enough photographers around for them not to be a novelty, so if you were really observant and you had a good eye, like him, you could capture people acting naturally. It’s almost as if he flitted in and out of their lives, taking a few snaps and then disappearing again. Like a bird, in fact. So wish me luck that when I give the Swindon Society some Bird on Wednesday, they don’t give me the bird.