Photography

Pictures on this website — Equipment & Techniques

This page was last modified on 15 September 2010.

Cameras

The pictures on this site were all taken by me unless otherwise clearly stated. Whilst compiling this section, I notice that I seem to have a penchant for Canon equipment. Funny, because my Dad and brother went for Nikon kit when they got all their “toys” in the 1980s and 90s; however, in more recent times family and friends have tended to follow my example when choosing new machinery!

Canon TX manual (film)

The earliest photos, prior to July 1998, were taken on a Canon TX manual camera with a Canon 50mm or Soligor 135mm lens.

Canon EOS-50E (film)

Most of the pictures currently on the site, up to November 2002, were taken using a Canon EOS-50E SLR camera looking through a Tamron 28/200 autofocus zoom lens. This is was a lovely bit of kit, somewhat bulky but nice and solid, and still the best for making excellent results from a point-and-shoot-NOW situation. It also can take time-exposures of infinite duration, whereas both digital cameras (below) can do no longer than 15 seconds — which limits specialist lighting-techniques e.g. in old railway tunnels. It says much for the advantages of digital that, in spite of the EOS-50E’s brilliance, for nearly five years it remained stored with a film mostly-exposed and awaiting developing ever since the purchase of…

Canon PowerShot G2 (digital)

In December 2002 I couldn’t resist dipping my toe into the digital-photography waters; seems I did so a very good time, just as compact cameras and decent-sized memory cards became available, and CD-writing capability became standard issue on new computers. Photos on this site taken by me between December 2002 and April 2005 must have been taken by my G2; several of them are on Richard’s Cambridge & Oxford cycle route. After 7,943 shots during the course of 2 years and 5 months, my G2 died electrically (again – I’d had it repaired the first time), and it was beyond economic repair. So, I looked around and got a…

Canon PowerShot S2-IS (digital)

I had been going to get the Powershot G6 which is the logical successor to my G2, but it was pointed out to me that the S2-IS had a huge (12x) optical zoom plus Image Stabilisation (a kind of anti-shake system). OK, so it takes different memory-cards and batteries to the G2, but this isn’t a problem as my followers (!) can receive dontaions of these. The S2 also can take higher-quality movie-clips. Only a few photos from the S2 (including this one) have made it onto the site at present (so much backlog still!).

After the “click”…

Films

Older films were processed by mail order at York Photo Labs in Standard size (Compact before July 1998). A selection (mainly from Silverstone 1998) was processed at WHSmith in 7×5 size. The remainder was done at Boots.

Scanning

Scanning was carried out by me in 1998-2000 using the University of Kent’s scanner in the Computing department; I own an HP Scanjet scanner whose output hasn’t included much material on this website as yet.

Image-processing

Scanned TIFFs were converted to JPEG format using xv (thanks to John Bradley) at quality setting 92%, smoothing 0%. In some cases I have made use of xv’s manipulation features to brighten up or otherwise improve images. (Note: xv is an image-processing application that runs under the Linux operating-system.)

Digital photos were resized and manipulated as desired using Adobe Photoshop 5.0 LE, or more recently Gimp.

Copyright

Please remember that every photo on this site is the result of a fair amount of work (as well as luck/opportunism) on my part, and is Copyright. I ask that you respect this.

Further information

I am happy to answer any questions you may have concerning the source, taking, manipulation or other aspects of any picture on this site.