photography...
old school…
I remember my very first camera. A Kodak Brownie 127. About as basic as they come. No controls other than a shutter button. A roll of 127 black and white film completed the package.
My next camera I inherited from my dad, a Paxina 29, a 120 format camera with 4 shutter speeds (1/25, 1/75, 1/125 and B) and a wind-on knob for the film. I remember taking it to Whitby in 1973. I still have the photos, now yellowed with age though the negatives are still good. It was very easy to forget to wind on the film - I wonder how many people have taken as many double exposures as me?
My first SLR was a Minolta. An X-500. I still have it complete with motor drive. The Minolta lenses are all very good: 28mm, 50mm and 135mm; all prime lenses. Much of the photography was on 35mm slide film; very little on print stock.
night school…
In the early 80's my collaboration with Michael Wilson prompted me to start a series of lectures for photographic societies. Based largely on Michael's work my aim was to translate theory into practical knowledge useful to photographers. The "coloured shadows" are everything to do with the "white point", the grey card and colour temperature. The polarity and tension between light and dark is the basis for understanding RGB colour space, the CIE chromaticity diagram, and later the sRGB model. The nature of the penumbra translates directly into understanding depth of field and bokeh. The lectures were mostly given in pubs, meeting rooms and village halls in the evenings after work and were always well received.
new school...
With the digital age came my first compact camera - a Canon Powershot G2 - which I still use for underwater photography. Later SLRs include the Nikon D40x - a brilliant little entry-level SLR that I use more times than I care to mention. It gets thrown into a bag for trips out and packs away into nothing bigger than a credit card.
Photography remains one of my three main leisure activities aside scuba diving and motorbikes.
