EQUIPMENT

Photographers can often get bogged down by “gear”.  Yes, your choice of equipment is important in terms of its application (it's hard to photograph wildlife with a 24mm lens) but these days it’s possible to capture an amazing image on a mobile ‘phone simply by pointing it in the right direction.  Therefore although what follows is a brief history of my own cameras and I love experimenting with new technology - both hardware and software - it’s important to remember that ultimately the joy is in capturing the image while absorbing and embracing the world around us...

When I was eight years of age, my birthday gift was a Polaroid Land Camera 1000SE.  It made my photography both instant and infuriating.  Polaroid film was difficult to store and old film exhibited all sorts of terrible colour casts, something there was no way of knowing until you pressed the shutter.

At age twelve, Mrs. Duxbury (a teacher at my school) gave me a fully-manual vintage Leica, and along with a high-quality light meter I used it to learn the principles of photography and composition.  At the time I had no idea how lucky I was, but as a result I saved up for an Olympus SLR, then an unreliable Praktica and all manner of both 35mm and 110mm point-and-shoot models.

In 1996, an Olympus Camedia C-400 became my first digital camera.  A whopping 0.35 megapixels.  It wasn’t much more than a (very) expensive toy, but it set the tone for years to come and a 3.3 megapixel Olympus C-3020 was soon to follow.

Digital was a revelation and required a whole new discipline of image processing, but the cameras I had used lacked the level of control afforded by a good film SLR.  Having tried (and disliked) an Olympus Camedia E-10 along came…

...the Canon EOS D30, a ground-breaking, true SLR that produced exceptionally clean images and had full manual control.  I haven’t shot on film since (February 2001), and today I still love that camera more than the Canon EOS D60 and just as much as the EOS 5D Mark II that followed.

Today my bodies of choice are a mirrorless Canon R6 Mark II together with a Canon 5DS for 50.6-megapixel high-resolution landscape images.  For video I also use a Sony α7R III and Sony α7 III, together with a Sony α9 and its outstanding auto-focus and stacked sensor.