Welcome to my photography website!
I won't label myself as any particular type of photographer - there is a freedom that comes from a lack of specialisation. As a surgeon, I already have one area in my life that is super-specialised, and I'm happy to keep it that way! Like many kids of the 80's I played around with my father's film cameras as a child and got into digital photography later - around 2009 - with an Olympus E-410, then 'upgrading' a couple of years later to a Canon 60D. Progressing to the Fuji mirrorless system with the X-T1 in 2014 brought about a change and some personal development as a photographer. It was a joy to shoot with and the portability over the Canon system meant that I shot more with it, so coupled with a desire to learn and improve it served me well. 2017 saw a change again, back to the DSLR world with the Nikon D850, but it was clear that mirrorless technology was the way forward and in 2019 I moved to a 2 camera set-up consisting of the Fuji GFX 50S and the Fuji X-T3. In 2022 the GFX was upgraded to a 100S and the X-T3 gave way to a Leica SL2-S. The SL2-S was a brilliant system, but heavy, and walking up mountains requires gram-counting most of the time, so in 2024 I swapped it for a Q3. The GFX100S remains, and with the quality of these 2 systems I can't honestly find a reason to change for the foreseeable!
Over the past few years I have also rediscovered film, and what a discovery! With so many people shooting digital these days it is hard not to feel crowded out, but going back to film is a breath of fresh air! There is a sense of peace, of slow, methodical working; an intentionality that is required by the nature of the medium but becomes a habit with time. And it is a habit that permeates the digital workflow too, given a chance.
The website itself is divided broadly into digital and film content. I feel this is a natural separation because both the process of shooting and the output are tangibly different between the two media. Film is then categorised into colour, black and white, and pinhole, all of which have their distinct characteristics. As for digital, I struggled a bit to settle on a satisfactory categorisation. Ultimately I settled on time; dividing my digital portofolios in to blocks of 5 years, as I felt this showed the progress in technique, vision and intent most distinctly. We all go through phases of photographic growth, and there is some commonality in the themes of these phases if not with time-frames. Where I have shot projects I have given them the requisite gallery space too.
The 'Interact' section holds contact details, a blog (that I very infrequently update), details on ordering prints and books in the 'Shop', and details of camera club talks that I deliver in the 'Talks' section.
I hope you enjoy perusing the site, but I will add a disclaimer that colours on a monitor may not be as I intended (more on that below). The uploaded files are also optimised for the web and so not always the highest quality. The printed image is often the finest output for a photograph, and I would always recommend a physical print when it comes to artistic fidelity and faithful reproduction. But at least this gives you an idea!
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A note on colour space: All the images displayed on this website are JPEGs in the sRGB colour space. I think this is currently the most optimal for web-based viewing, but it does mean the colour palette is limited and sometimes some of the images may not be displayed exactly the way I want, with the colours as I intended them. This will also vary greatly depending on your viewing device. There is no way around this currently so we'll just have to make do, but I wanted to mention it because it raises the point that even with today's technology the only real way to fully appreciate a photograph or piece of art is to see it in print. Or, in the case of a photograph, at least on a display the photographer has set up themselves. For those of you who would like to know more about colour spaces and why this makes such a big difference, check out this useful article from Cambridge in colour.
