Photography

Photography has been an interest of mine for many years and will continue to be for many more to come.

A small portfolio of my work that I have put together contains a selection of what I consider to be some of my better photos. I still enjoying flicking through these pictures myself.

A little history on my hobby of photography

Lurking in a drawer somewhere in my parents’ house are a pile of photos that I took back in the late 1980s when I was around 8 or 9 years of age. One of the earliest photos of mine that I can recall is of Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh walking towards me with his minders, taken outside the Royal Yacht Squadron along Cowes sea front on the Isle of Wight. I can recall exactly the feeling of anxiety I had in the moments preceding the big capture, which stemmed from a combination of not knowing if he would definitely pass me and if he did, not knowing how long I’d get to compose and take the picture. He did indeed walk towards me, right past me in fact, I can remember being absolutely thrilled and I’d got the photo to prove it.

Without the photo, which still exists, this event would by now have become a distant memory in my mind, perhaps even completely erased. It was and still is this ability to capture moments such as these forever in a photo that make photography appeal to me so much.

Around the age of 17 I was wanting to get more out of my photos. I’d seen typical night time road shots with streaking tail lights and I wanted to recreate this effect in my pictures. For my 18th birthday I received a 35mm Samsung compact zoom and much to my delight it allowed long exposures through use of the camera’s bulb setting. I snapped my way through countless rolls of film with this camera, but by the time I was 21 my practical instincts kicked in and I asked myself “what exactly are you going to do with all these negatives and prints?“. The simple solution, which I chose to follow, was to put what I had in a drawer and make the move to digital. My first digital camera was a Canon PowerShot A70, acquired in 2003 in payment for a website I built – I don’t think I would have been able to afford it in any other way.

Like most digital users, I truly loved the ability to snap away at anything and everything and not have to worry about development costs. The A70 had full manual control, which meant that I could really start to get a bit more creative. It remained my trusty partner for 3 years, the last year of which was shared with a 35mm Canon EOS 300 (SLR). At this point I had gone from poor student, to a full time graduate in the working world. When I received a rare bonus, I decided to go the whole hog and invest in a digital SLR. Since early 2006 I have been the happy owner of a Nikon D50 and since 2010 a Nikon D90.