Vivian Maier and The White Bear
It’s hard not be distracted from Vivian Maier’s work by her life. As told in the 2015 documentary Finding Vivian Maier, the extraordinary stories of her life and the discovery of her work have contributed substantially to her posthumous status as a...
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The Kodak No 2 Folding Autographic Brownie
Kodak No. 2 Folding Autographic Brownie With the crammed, tiny text engraved on the front plate that describes the rather eccentric ‘Autotime’ system, and a stylus on the back to engrave notes on the negative using the Autographic feature, the...
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Nikon Film Cameras in The Movies
As a Nikon user and collector, I've noticed quite a few Nikon film cameras appearances in the movies and on TV shows. This short article outlines those appearances. I've also written in more detail about the Nikon F's appearance in...
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Early Cameras, a Timeline
This timeline of early cameras describes significant photographic milestones and early cameras representative of their year of introduction between the inception of photography and 1900. I've also provided an overview of the most important developments decade by decade from 1840-1900...
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The Greatest Movies featuring Photographers: Apocalypse Now and Rear Window
This article started as a list of classic film cameras in movies, taken from my own observations and from internet research and focused largely on the cameras I shoot with - Nikon F SLRs and Leica M Rangefinders. As I...
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Leica Film Cameras in Movies
The legendary German marque has had more than its fair share of movie appearances, particularly the M3. Leica pioneered the 35mm 'miniature format', back in 1930 with the first practical camera to use standard cinema film, which required high quality lenses...
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Camera Timeline – Year by Year
This year by year camera timeline lists significant milestones and cameras representative of the year, as well as some curiosities and evolutionary dead-ends from 1900. The timeline does not include developments in lenses, film processes or camera phones. These can...
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The Nikon F6 – Great Film Cameras
The Nikon F6 was the last of the line of Nikon's professional SLR film cameras, and perhaps the most technically refined and advanced 35mm film camera ever made. It is the film camera I taken most pictures with. This is...
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The Nikon FM3A – Great Film Cameras
The Nikon FM3A (often written as FM3a) is one of the most refined manual SLR's ever made, and as a 21st century manual focus film SLR, somewhat of a throwback. It was introduced in July 2001 when the shift to...
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Photography Timeline – From Chemistry to Computation
There are many strands in a photography timeline - the chemistry of film and processing, the physics of optics, the mechanical engineering of shutters, the electronics of metering and digital photography, and the iconic camera designs that bring everything together....
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Around the World with a Leica Q
Nearly three years after I first posted about my new Leica Q on this site, it was stolen from a South Kensington Pub. This was after a visit to the Natural History Museum to see the 2019 Wildlife Photographer of...
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Cindy Sherman – Star of the Films That Never Were
Cindy Sherman is one of the world's leading artists – for 30 years, she has starred in all her photographs – and yet the more we see of her, the less recognisable she is. She's a Hitchcock heroine, a busty Monroe, an abuse...
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Fan Ho – the Great Master
I first came across Fan Ho's work in a podcast from Ted Forbes' The Art of Photography. Some photographer's work gives me an immediate jolt the first time I see it. Fan Ho's photography, like that of Brassaï and William Klein,...
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Brassaï’s Dark and Beautiful Realm
Brassaï is one of those photographers whose work had an immediate and profound effect on me. His dreamlike nocturnal street photography and sharply observed portraits of life after dark provide a unique set of images that is as close to a...
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William Klein and The Zero Degree of Street Photography
I came across the work of William Klein when browsing though photography books in a book shop. It didn't take many turns of the pages for me to decide to buy the book and learn more about the man and...
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Wet Plate Photography – Alcohol, Ether and Gun Cotton
Wet plate aka gun cotton photography Wet plate photography was not easy. The wet-plate collodion process used between the 1850s and 1880s uses a solution of gun-cotton in ether and alcohol and requires the entire photographic process including coating the...
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Fox Talbot and Early Photography
Fox Talbot at dawn The recent exhibition Fox Talbot: Dawn of the Photograph at the Science Museum in London which ended on September 11th 2016 was described as ‘magical to behold’ by Time Out and ‘ground-breaking’ by The Times. I found it extremely...
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The Timeless Quality of Black & White Photographs
Black and white images often possess a timeless quality that is more difficult to achieve with colour images. This is largely because colour provides more visual clues as to when a photograph was taken. Variance in the colours themselves can sometimes...
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The Importance of Form
We have had colour photography since the 1930s and the invention of Kodachrome, though it took until the 1970s for it become the norm. So why has black and white photography persisted? Perhaps the most obvious difference between colour and...
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When Photos Looked Like Paintings – Pictorialism
Waterloo Place by Leonard Misonne (1899) There is something magical to me about pictorialist photography, particularly urban pictorialism, as shown here in Leonard Misonne's accomplished example from 1899. In addition to having the skill to take photographs with the cumbersome...
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The Beauty of the Long Exposure
I have seen some astonishing black and white photography that uses very strong neutral density (ND) filters such as the B+W ND 110 to blur cloud movement using a long exposure. I wanted to get some shots with the same effect into...
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