The Photojournalist of Apocalypse Now
This article started as research into classic film cameras in movies. This led me to movies featuring photographers, of which my two favourites are Apocalypse Now, featuring Dennis Hopper as a manic photojournalist, and Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window. The search...
Read More
The Greatest Movies about Photographers: Rear Window
This article was inspired by classic film cameras in movies, taken from my own observations and from internet research and initially focused on the cameras in the films. From cameras in movies, it's a short step to movies about photographers....
Read More
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...
Read More
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...
Read More
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...
Read More
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...
Read More
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...
Read More
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...
Read More
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...
Read More
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...
Read More
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....
Read More
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...
Read More
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...
Read More
Fan Ho – Smoke, Mist, Light and Shadow
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,...
Read More
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...
Read More
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...
Read More
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...
Read More
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...
Read More
A Game Changing Camera: The Leica Q
Before the Leica Q Before the Leica Q, I have never considered owning a Leica. I have been 100% loyal to Nikon for film SLRs and DSLRs (I am now on my 4th generation - the Df), though that isn't...
Read More
Back to Film with the Nikon F3
It's been a while... Before I went back to film with a Nikon F3 in 2016, my previous film camera was a Canon IXUS, 20 years ago. This was a point and shoot compact which took APS film, a short...
Read More
The Timeless Quality of Black & White Photographs
Why Timeless? A black white image with that timeless quality 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...
Read More
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...
Read More
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...
Read More
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...
Read More