About Me
Introduction – what you see is what I took!
I have been a photographer for over 30 years. I started with my father’s 35mm Mamiya SLR with manual lenses.
I photograph people, places, street photography, landscape, objects, animals; in fact anything. You will see a noticeable absence** of portraits and private photographs of people, this is because I do these photographs only for the people themselves, and not for publication.
**Since writing this I have included some, which can be found in videos and on Flickr.
Watching and framing…
As a young boy I was acutely aware that some people would be happy to kill me.
My father was a soldier and around the time I was 5 or 6 I first became aware that some Irish catholics wanted to kill and bomb anyone or anything related to the British Army. I was in the midst of this.
From this time on, being aware of my surroundings was critical for survival, be it mine, my families, our friends and other people that could just be nearby. Such a situation at such a young age creates an attention for detail. Bags left unattended, cars parked unexpectedly, people behaving out of character and inappropriate for the circumstances, are all examples of triggers.
Times have changed and the behaviour of these people has been well and truly curtailed, but my mind remains the same. Still concentrated on what is happening.
Open for everything…
I see photography as being the culmination of several key skills. Observation, configuration, compassion and composition.
Observation: without the ability to see the potential or the interesting part of a scene, no good photograph can happen.
Configuration: without the ability to set the camera, lens, position and lighting to expose correctly, no good photograph can happen.
Compassion: without the ability to care about the subject with respect, no good photograph can happen.
Composition: without the ability to “include as much as is needed to complete comprehension, whilst leaving out what would distort understanding”, no good photograph can be taken.
What you see is really what I took!
I very rarely use (<1%) Â editing tools and the pictures you see will almost always be unedited. I mostly just crop an image where the lens and circumstance could not cope. I tend to use fixed lenses and I use digital as if it were an analogue film camera with a dynamic film type and more than 36 exposures.
I currently use a either the Nikon D610 (FX) (A & M modes) or Nikon D5200 (entry level DX DSLR) (Manual Mode) together with 3 Nikon 1970-80’s manual AIS lenses and one converted Nikkor-Q. Lenses: 28mm f3.5; 50mm f1.8; 80-200mm f4 zoom & Nikkor-Q 135mm f4. Older pictures are taken with either the Canon G3 or Canon G12 cameras.
I am also now using Canon 5d Mark 1 (Classic), a Fujifilm X100 (first generation) and a Fujifilm X-Pro1.
I am British and live in Germany together with my wife. She uses a Nikon D3300 (smaller entry level DSLR) and either the Sigma 17-50mm F2.8 or the manual lenses in manual mode. I might manage to get her to publish some of her photographic work, it is good but different in style to mine.
Alex.,
You can see my work via: