I’ve always had an interest in photography.
In my teen years it was black & white with DIY developing and printing.
I didn’t own an enlarger, but my school friend’s dad did, so he allowed me use it occasionally in their bathroom propped over their bath. That was until I emptied the chemicals into the bath without flushing it with water, so it stained their bath. I don’t think I was allowed after that!
Photography is such a versatile hobby and over the years I have tackled landscape photography, portrait photography & astrophotography with varying degrees of success.
By 2003 digital cameras were emerging, although my first digital camera took 30 seconds to start-up, and shut down equally as quickly, so many shots were missed. It also ate batteries like they were going out of fashion, and probably only had about a 1 mega-pixel sensor.
In 2008 I started to take up still photography again as a hobby, and my first camera was a Panasonic DMC-FZ50. It performed very well and I still use it as my second camera.
I was surfing the Internet one day and I came across a site offering DSLR workshops for either landscapes or steam trains run by Don Bishop, based in Somerset.
Steam trains sounded fascinating, so I booked myself on a workshop/charter to coincide with the spring gala on the West Somerset Railway.
I had a super three days, the weather was perfect, we were allowed to go track-side and scrambling over railway lines was not something I had done since a child.
Don was a superb instructor, teaching me the correct use of shutter speed, aperture, and ISO settings.
The last day Don introduced me to post-processing with PhotoShop.
I have since attended many of Don’s charters on heritage lines throughout the country, it was on one of these charters that I got to look through Don’s Canon 5D DSLR, and that was it, I just had to have one!
The Canon was a professional DSLR with a ‘full sized’ sensor (35mm film equivalent), and although I don’t class myself as anywhere near professional standard, Don instilled into me the standards one should aspire to with any images.
My next camera was the next version up to Don’s a Canon 5D MkII. I love this camera, it’s a true DSLR as the lenses are interchangeable, and the viewfinder is optical through the lens.
I’ve attended many of Don’s landscape workshops with his wife Jane, plus two trips to Scotland, the Lake District and Wales, although the weather wasn’t kind to us much of the time.