| My interest in photography began in my teens, when Uncle Jack in Sheffield initiated me into the mysteries of darkroom processing in the attic of a small terraced house in Hillsborough. in the early 1950s. This was vintage stuff - glass quarter-plate negatives exposed in an old "Century" camera with a pneumatic shutter. | |
The
plates were orthochromatic and developed individually in dishes under
a red safelight. Prints were
made on Printing Out Paper, exposed to daylight in small frames in the back yard. All very much "hands
on", "seat of the pants" stuff. |
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My
first real camera was a German Zeiss Ikon "Nettar" which took
twelve exposures on 120 film. Very basic by today's standards - no built-in
exposure system - you looked at the weather and guessed how to set the aperture
and shutter speed. Focusing was equally manual - estimate the distance,
set it on the lens and hope for the best. You often got both the exposure
and the distance wrong, and a successful negative was often judged simply
on whether you managed to get the exposure right and the picture sharp. |
| Then
came national Service in the RAF. By sheer fluke, I found myself in a general
purpose photographic unit on a bomber command station. Together with the other National
Servicemen in the unit I reckoned we taught the RAF more about photography
than they taught us. Except that I got the chance to play with Speed Graphic
cameras and 5" by 4" sheet film negatives. The kind used by pressmen
in old black and white "B" movies. |
| These
two years gave me an easy familiarity with materials, equipment and processes
which has since stood me in good stead, as I've
never found photographic techniques either mysterious or intimidating. By
the end of National Service I'd progressed from the Zeiss to a battered
1928 Rolleiflex that I bought cheap because it had been dropped from a balcony
in Vienna and had a dent in the hood. |
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| As
a largely self-taught photographer, I dabbled in it for years and only began
to take myself seriously in my mid-forties when I was asked to produce a
major exhibition of colour landscapes at the District College in Wakefield.
This show subsequently moved to venues in Nottingham and Huddersfield and
much to my surprise, I sold nearly 50 of the 60 prints on show. I haven't
looked back since. The exhibition coincided with starting to teach photography
on a full-time basis to honours degree students at Bretton Hall College |
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My photographic interests are eclectic, and include: Northern Dales and West Yorkshire Landscapes, Victorian Textile Mill buildings in West Yorkshire, and more recently, projects questioning male stereotypes together with personal work that is overtly homoerotic. I exhibit and sell work locally, and spent much of 1998 working with staff from "Photo 98" and establishing an alternative photographic group in Huddersfield. |
For
several years I was a prominent member and one-time President of Huddersfield
Photographic Society, but left after the society refused to exhibit the
series of prints called "Twelve Faces of Jonathan" which are
on this site |
| People always ask photographers about equipment and materials as if they were some kind of holy grail. Over the years I've gradually slimmed down my equipment and no longer use either a battery of lenses or camera bodies. Until a couple of years ago, I used an auto focus Fuji medium format GA645 with a fixed lens. A lovely camera that handles beautifully and produces consistently good negatives. |  |
I
never thought I'd abandon it for digital. I envisaged myself ending my
years as some kind of eccentric photographic dinosaur, pottering about
in a darkroom producing hand-printed fine-art images. How
wrong can you be? Early in 2002, a Chinese lover bought
a Nikon Coolpix 5000 back for me from Hong Kong. With much trepidation,
I went on holiday to the Dordogne later that year taking just the Coolpix
and no film camera backup. I was amazed by the results.
A month in Beijing later in the year clinched it. This camera, which I
thought looked like something you'd buy as a joke from Woolworth's, produced
A3 prints, via an iMac and Epson 1270 printer with no problem. I've not been near the darkroom since. The Coolpix
5000 has been upgraded to a 5700. |
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