History

I was lead to photography from a very early age, my father was and still is a very keen Amateur photographer, and both my Grandparent’s were more than casual uses of a camera. So it was inevitable that I would gain an interest and photography would become my main hobby throughout my childhood.
My first camera came one Christmas and came from my Grandparent. I can still remember to this day sitting on the floor opening my Christmas presents with my Grandpa sitting on the armchair watching over me. He tried to convince me that the box was simply a convenient leftover that he’d used to pack a teddy bear, but I was beyond that. A Black and White Polariod camera.
This was a great start to photography giving instantaneous results being relatively robust but at the same time introducing the basics of composure, exposure, camera shake and development.
I still remember having to squeeze and rotate the exposure button to set the exposure and pulling out the film, counting for sixty seconds before separating the picture from the chemical sachet.
My next camera was a Zenit B single lens reflex, SLR. The first time I looked through the viewfinder I saw a dark grainy image and wondered how this could be better than my Polariod. But it was a ‘Proper’ 35mm camera capable of both black and white plus colour. Being the ‘B’ model the camera was without any metering system so I also had a Luminix handheld meter. I got the camera with a compact relatively high aperture standard lens, hence the dark view.
I used this camera for many years, eventually getting a x2 teleconverter to add flexibility. I soon lean’t about shutter speeds and aperture setting and that the lens was actually quite good at f5.6.
I then moved on to a Pentax K1000 with it’s main benefit to me being the built in metering system and bayonet mounted, so I could swap my teleconverter in/out easier.
I used these two cameras for almost a decade for both colour and black and white photography. At times we did a lot of black and white photography and with my father having a keen interest we were lucky enough to have him setup a darkroom such that we could develop and print our own photographs. I said we because I was one of three brothers, the eldest and each time I gained a new camera the old went down the line of brothers.
About this time I also started going to the local photographic society with my father, Chesterfield Photographic Society. For the fun of it I entered a couple of slides in the club competitions. But in the main it was a learning exercise seeing other photographers pictures and hearing about their techniques.
My next move was on my 18th birthday, we went to Jessops in Leicester to get my first Nikon. Jessops of those days was very different from todays shop style. The pricelist, which became a bible of many photographers and other shop keepers was a massive A1 sheet of paper. The shop had a large viewing and demonstration area with almost everything you cold think of and then there was the Argos style purchasing, sorry Argos Jessops were there first. In the showroom your sales representative completed your order on a computer terminal, well ahead of their time, this checked their stock and called it out from the warehouse. You then moved through the connected building to a counter at the warehouse to collect your purchases. A very memorable experience.
Well I mentioned that I’d gone in to get a Nikon and I’d already decided on an FM model, but what was this an FM2. We looked at it and I had to have it, better top shutter speed, titanium shutter, Oh and in black. A standard lens and MD-12 were added and there we were my first Nikon. An advantage of the Nikon for me was that my father was using Nikon at the time having an F3 and range of lenses from a 20mm upto a 300mm and 105 macro. So for the first time I could explore wide-angle and true telephoto.
Over the years I started building up my equipment, bags, tripods etc and my lens range with the addition of 24mm, 90mm, 135mm and 500mm mirror. This gave me a very capable armory and I had a lot of fun.
It was some time before I ventured into a more advanced camera, I liked the FM2 manual ‘I have control’ approach. But autofocus was now a mature technology and my brother had a Nikon F801 and was both happy with the camera and quality of the lenses. So when the F90 was launched I bought one, with mid range zoom and SB-25 flash. It could still use all my manual lenses and I could use the camera in manual mode. It gave me the opportunity to test out the new metering system on the autofocus lens and autofucus in general.
I stayed with this configuration for some time before deciding that I wanted to go 100% autofocus. Not just for the autofocus lenses but also the improved metering systems, speed of focusing, improved flash performance and metering and brighter focusing screens.
The Nikon F100 was just announced so I exchanged the F90 for one and started swapping my lenses. But what to swap the FM2 for, I was now fining it used less due to its darker viewfinder and now I wore glasses it was difficult to see the meter. The solution, an F5, with it’s robust chassis, advanced metering system and high performance motor drive it was ideal.
I now had a very good pair of bodies allowing me to carry different types of film for different requirements and no real compromise between functionality and quality between the two. The arsenal of lenses was also on the up 18-35, 28-105 and 80-200 AFS zooms were supported by 24mm, 85m, 105mm Macro, 105mm DC and 300mm AFS. Plus the excellent Nikon 1.4x teleconverter, you can read my opinions on these lenses in my equipment bag.
I predominantly shoot slide film and you can ready my thoughts on film stock, but colleagues and family like to look at prints. So as to not compromise the original pictures quality I purchases a film scanner simply to enable me to print out my pictures for sharing with others. This also allowed my to start working with my pictures in a similar way to that when I was working in black and white in the darkroom. You can read about my setup and opinions in my digital darkroom.
Like many I was tempted by the ever growing range and convenience of digital cameras. But having tried several wel known models from Kodak and Fuji I was never happy with the results, convenience was great but what’s the point of having a convenient camera if it doesn’t get the result your after in the first place. But I still wanted the immediacy that only digital currently offers. So there was only one answer a Nikon Digital SLR, but thanks to Nikon that one answer was infact two either a D1h or D1x. Price apart what really separated the cameras for me was the speed. With the D1h I would be able to shoot at upto 5 frames per second and upto 40 frames before the camera would stop, a similar performance to my F100. This compares to the lowly 3 frames per second of the D1x, a figure I was quite happy with in the days of my FM2 and MD-12. From test shots I was also not convinced of the D1x’s resolution improvements over that of the D1h for the extra outlay. So a D1h was added to my kitbag and along with it a SB-80DX flash to allow flash photography with the D1h.
The next move was the arrival of the D2H, this answered many of my wishes having used the D1h for some time, a 50% increase in resoluion, faster auto-focus and higher frame rate. The colours of the D2h were punchier than that of the D1h. A big bonus was Nikons continued compatability and familiarity trand. The new camera fitted easily into my arsenal using all the lenses and features of the camera were easily found. There were alot of critisism's levied at the D2h in paricular of noisey images and it's true that noise in the shadows is present but with correct xposure and use of the histogram cracking images akin to higher resolution camer's can be achieved.
The D2h was followed by the D2x, a three fold increase in pixels and hence large files, this also instigated an upgrade in several areas. Firstly memory cards had to be upgraded due to the file size and secondly my computer needed an upgrade to process the images at anything near an acceptable rate. Due to the poor values of trading in the D2h I kept this and am glad I did as having two digital cameras at sports events is highly desirable and in good conditions it's hard if not impossible to distinguish a D2h print from a D2h even printed at A3.
I'm know focussing on rationalising my lens collection inline with the demands of the D2x's high resolution.
What next, well I’d like Nikon to continue developing along the lines of the DX sized sensor rather than a full frame digital camera and produce a higher resolution version of the D2h, with current lens technology and considering the size most images would be printed at I see minimal benifit in increasing image sizes much beyond that of the D2x's 12.2Mpixels but would like to see improvements in image noise and colour rendition.