Photography

I have always been interested in photography, probably influenced by my father who was a professional photographer in his early career and also worked for Kodak as a Professional Sales Representative. In recent years I have have taken a greater interest in photography and I bought a Pentex K10D digital single lense reflex (DSLR) camera. I have also purchased a Sigma 200mm telephoto lense and a Pentax 50mm prime lense. All my lenses are autofocus.

I currently use a Pentax K5 body with the lenses mentioned above.

After having had the Pentax K10D for a few months and using it on automatic all the time I wanted to learn what all the other dials and buttons did and how to compose photographs. After looking around I found that the Bishopsgate Institute in London did a couple of short courses that taught the areas that I wanted to learn. The course tutor was Matthew Lea. The courses were very instructive teaching you about the principles of cameras such as stops, aperture etc, how to use all the functions on the camera and the principles of composition.

The second course had a project which resulted in some photos from each student project being shown at an exhibition at the institute. My project was inspired by the photographs of Winston O Link, an americam photgrapher who took some wonderful photographs of the huge american steam locomotives during the 1950's and 60's. Some of his photos can be seen here.

The photographs were taken on the Great Central Preservation Railway between Leicester and Loughborough over the course of a couple of months.

In 2009 I went on a photographic holiday to Cuba, organised by Urban Photography. The holiday was led by Jonathon Bayley who is a great photographer and teacher. The holiday was a lot of fun and covered location photoshoots with male and female models, street photography, and landscape photography. The group was pretty small and we all had a great time and fun together.

The holiday consisted of a week in Havana with three photoshoots with models. Two of the shoots were in an old house in Havana and the third outside with some of the old Cuban cars.

There was also a photoshoot at a dance school for youngsters, a trip to the cigar factory and a rum factory, a trip to the countryside, which included a cave, and a walk round a local market and neighbourhood. More of my photographs from this trip can be seen in the photoalbum on this site.

There are several photographers who I admire.

Martin Parr is a favourite as I like the way that his photographs form a commentary on society, See the photo opposite of myself with Martin Parr recently.

I also like Gregory Crewdson for his dramatic photographs which use techniques very similar to cinema film production.