Flickr: brownphotographic

I'm Rob Brown, an Englishman living in Ipswich, MA (USA).

You can purchase images and prints here

www.brownphotographic.com
Brown Photographic Blog
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My camera-ography

I've been taking photos since a very young age and was mostly more interested in my father's amazing slideshows going back to the 50's. I loved sitting down on a Sunday night and going through Safari photos from where he grew up in Kenya.

I think my first experience was with a Boots 110 camera. I shot with that until I was 7, then on my first trip to Kenya my dad bought me a 35mm film Olympus Trip AF, with a fixed 35mm lens. Took awesome photos and I reeled off many rolls of film while my dad and brother blasted away with their OM SLRs and motor winders. I was of course quite jealous but had neither the money to buy one or the desire to learn what an F-Stop was at that time. I dropped it on the way home at Nairobi airport and broke its back off. Wasn't a happy bunny and ruined half a roll. Oops.

I picked up an Olympus OM-10 SLR aged 12 and started shooting very sporadically. Money was the main barrier. Aged 17-18 ('96/'97) I was very much in to drawing and oil painting and used photography as a means to provide components to photo-realistic montages. I was given my late uncle's Minolta 7000 (not called the horribly named Maxxum in Europe) aged 18 and took it on a tour around Kenya and was hooked. I shot a fair amount in University (in south Wales) and then when I took up full time work all the spare time on my hands led to me wanting to be creative again. My dad finally persuaded me to get into transparency film as you could see the image exactly as you had created it; unlike with negative film where you had to make a positive print from the negative film. That was the moment that I got totally absorbed.

I was often out late at night taking cityscapes of the London skyline and then in '02 my father gave me his old Canon EOS-5 SLR and bought me a 28-135IS for my birthday. Totally hooked at this point and spent every moment reading up in magazines about photography. Spent all of my spare money on lenses and equipment. Along the way I did a bit of photo travelling with my friends to Europe and the west coast/Arizona desert of the US and after seeing my photos they decided an office job was a total waste of talent. So I embarked on the slippery climb towards getting paid for photography and established Brown Photographic in the summer of 2003. I started shooting gardens for a friend's high end West-End landscape garden design company and did that for a couple of years. I quickly realised that professional photography was comprised of a lot of business work, not just taking photos.

After a nasty incident where my EOS-5's dial broke on the first day in Arizona, I was totally convinced that twisty nobs and dials were a bad thing to contend with. So I went out and purchased a mint (complete with indestructable buttons) Canon EOS-1N and then proceeded on the painful journey to buy L glass.

In 2004 I travelled to Boston for my friends' wedding and took a bunch of candid photos on Fuji Astia. Came out great and they adorned the walls well before they purchased a single print from the well established professional. I sold them online on my (well before its time) site that linked images in a store front directly to my lab. Got a ton of orders and decided that taking photos of people was a fair deal more lucrative and challenging than landscapes.

In 2005 I finally decided to get into digital but looking around at that time, the options for full frame 35mm (there was no way that I was going for a crop sensor because of the focal length change) were pretty limited: Kodak (useless), Canon 1DS (wonderful and still expensive second hand) and Canon 1DS-II (astronomical price). The 5D hadn't yet come out and Nikon's digital cameras were a total joke (you can talk it up all you want Nikonians - I've got samples on my computer and they are AWFUL) until many years later when the D3 was announced. Besides, even if I was to buy the super-noisy D2X, with its 1.5 crop, I'd have to sell all of my glass and after having my fingers get burned, the many twisty nobs and dials and pieces on the Nikon system was not attractive whatsover. So I found a used Canon EOS-1DS for the princely sum of £3000 (that was about $5400 back then). After buying that I was all over the place taking photos.

I shot my first wedding in 2005 for my friends and got some amazing results and feedback. I'm proud enough to still have some of the photos I took there on my portfolio today (2009). I shot more weddings through the referrals in the UK, then in 2007 I moved to the US to marry my girlfriend Nicole. Deciding that I needed to go up in the world and get a more flexible camera with better low-light capability and more importantly a backup I purchased a new 5D. I quickly realised what a toy it was compared with the Canon 1 series that I was now so used to. With its 95% viewfinder (I was cropping everything in post), to its horribly slow shutter and mirror blackout time lag (I couldn't see people blink so I had to take multiple frames). Unfortunately I was spoiled and so I traded it in for a Canon EOS-1DS markII , which I am using still today. An incredible camera that I am continually surprised by.

I later purchased a 5D Mark II, which has simply wonderful image quality at high ISO (read low noise), but compared with the 1DS II I'm just not smitten with look of the images. Plus the handling and function is almost exactly the same as the original 5D... see my comments above on that one.

So I still shoot the majority of my images with the 1DS II and a Panasonic GF1 (with 20 1.7 lens). Both do the job admirably.