Me looking through a pinhole

About my photography

One of my first photographs

I started taking pictures when I was about 10 or 11 (that's 40 years ago now). My first camera was a Diana (a toy camera, now very collectable). I still have one film that I took with it. I didn't start taking photography seriously though until I started work and bought my first SLR.

When I first started my own printing in the early eighties, it was colour, using Cibachrome, as I was using colour slide film mostly then. I didn't have a proper darkroom so the drum processing method used with Cibachrome was ideal. I soon realised though that I could process black and white prints using the Cibachrome drums and that's how I first started in black and white. Later, when I got a proper darkroom, I switched to doing mainly black and white and eventually gave up doing my own colour printing completely.

I went back to colour in the late nineties, getting it processed and printed commercially, after I dismantled my darkroom due to an impending house move. The move never happened but I never had any inclination to setup my darkroom again and continued with colour and started to dabble in digital printing. Then early in 2005, prompted by a couple of unrelated occurrences, I started doing black and white again and have been doing so ever since. I do all my printing digitally now but still use film for origination as I still think it has advantages over digital capture.

I've recently gone through a, more or less, complete change of equipment and haved changed to using mainly rangefinder cameras. I do still have SLRs but they don't get much use these days.

I think I would describe my photographs as pictorial. I don't have any favourite subjects and will photograph anything that I think will make a picture. I'm not particularly into the latest toy/lo-fi camera craze but I will do the odd pinhole photograph. I prefer my subjects to be recogniseable and not obliterated by flare and fuzzy cheap lens effects. Having said that, I'll have a go at anything once (see the picture below).

'Mowercam' pinhole camera

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