“All photographs are accurate. None of them is the truth” Richard Avedon
I think the photography bug first bit when I was about nine, during holidays and family events a little Kodak Instamatic would appear and dad would take what appeared to be random photos of us. For my tenth birthday I asked for my own camera and received my own black Instamatic and a roll of film. I found the ability to freeze time fascinating and still do.
The Instamatic was brought out during holidays in North Wale for the next few years. However, my first serious camera was an Olympus OM-10 bought after leaving art college in the 80’s, at the time it was a close choice between it and the Nikon EM. Although I had been using Nikkormats at college the thing that swayed it was the Olympus was capable of manual exposure which I was told was a desirable thing to have.
A couple of years later I bought a secondhand OM-1 which I used for most of the 80’s together other OM bodies like the OM-2 and Spot Program. During this time I got a job at Nottingham Castle Museum cataloging exhibits. Here they used Canons which I didn’t like as much as my Olympus’s. Fast forward to the 90’s and after a few motley jobs I was now working for the University of Nottingham as a photographer where they used Nikons. Not long before auto focus had just appeared with Minolta forging the way, Olympus didn’t want to infringe the Honeywell patent so were left behind as Canon and Nikon adopted autofocus. Since I was using Nikons at work it made sense to go Nikon AF with an F601 and then F801s. Then by the mid 2000’s technology advanced further and film was being replaced by a CCD chip, so D80, D90, D7000… Until, in 2014 I side stepped to a mirrorless Sony A6000 drawn to be able to see the what I was going to get before pressing the shutter button . Again, because Nikon didn’t go mirrorless, I did wait and hoped but that was to come later. However, the Sony wasn’t a good match, I hated it’s fiddly little buttons and utilitarian design despite its decent image output so bit the bullet and emptied my wallet on a Fujifilm X-T1 kit.
This looked like the cameras I was used to using although more complex under the skin. I got some good shots with this camera and enjoyed using it but a few unpredictable ones, looking back now I should have kept it longer and learnt its foibles but the nagging pull of a full frame sensor eventually got the better of me, it was pure GAS, I know. So, along came a Sony A7 and then A7R ii… However, more recently in 2025 a couple of old Fuji’s have been added, a virtually unused X-T10 and a used X-Pro 1. I’m being drawn to older digital cameras for their simplicity and less clinical output. And after all it’s the message not the medium that’s important, something it’s easy to lose sight of with so much marketing pressure.
