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...

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...

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...

The Nikon F6 was announced at Photokina 2004, along with the digital Nikon D2X. As Thom Hogan observed at the time, the launch of a new pro SLR surprised a few people, but it really shouldn't have; Nikon delivered the F6 eight...

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...

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....

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...

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,...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...