Hobbies

Photography

As a kid I used to do a lot in black-and-white. My father and I used to take over the bathroom for the evening and turn it into a darkroom with all the chemical baths in trays in the bath. The enlarger went at the opposite end to the taps and we got some splendid results. Oh, the joys of winding your own 120 exposed neg rolls into a Johnson's developing drum!

These days it's all colour 35mm developed and printed by Mr. Kodak. In the past I've been commissioned to provide photograhic art work for the Acorn Adventure Ballooning booklet and have also sold some of my work to the Department. There are 4 shots of Florence, Sienna and Montecatini Alto at the head of OUCS main stairway, two of the beechwoods at The Strid near Bolton Abbey at one end of the first floor corridor and the rest of the gallery has some colourful balloon shots taken in France. More recently a series of landscape and unconventional works have also been commissioned by OUCS - these can be seen in the accounts office.

When I get time I have to find something different to adorn other parts of OUCS to relieve the cheerful ash grey/magnolia decor. Last year's (1998) adventure in Thailand produced a finished photographic record of some 350 shots, which certainly help to relive the experience, now joined by the 1999 expedition collection.

I use a Cannon EOS 600 with (usually) a 35-80mm fast autofocus lens. There's also a 75-200mm, bought in the naive belief that it would enable me to get good airshots at air shows. The Sigma 600mm fixed mirror lens does actually do this, but it's rather bigger than is usually convenient to drag around all day. For the moving image and digital stills there is a Sony PC100E HandyCam which provided the portrature in the most recent of the Thailand Journals.

Things often go in cycles. For some reason there's been a nautical bias in some of this year's shots.

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