Chris_Malcolm's photostream  

Rights to any of the digital imagery in my pages here are negotiable, and prints, special edits, resizings, etc. can be ordered.

Informal Photographic CV

Born 1942.

1954 Was lent a family friend's very cheap Kodak Box Brownie. 120 film. Displayed enough interest and aptitude that was lent a more complicated 120 roll film folding bellows camera which had manual lens and shutter and a rising front for keeping verticals straight in architectural shots. None of the family friends knew how to operate it, and it turned out to have bellows leaks which fogged the photos. But my struggles with it impressed my parents enough that I was given the next camera and later extras such as flash and darkroom kit as birthday and Xmas presents.

1955 KodaK Cresta. 120 film, 2 tab pull exposures, sunny & cloudy, plus a tab pull portrait lens. Did own developing and contact printing. Read lots of photography books and magazines in local library. Lost interest in photography when I left home for university in 1960. My left behind photographs and kit got lost in a parental house move.

1961 Just to have a camera for occasional snaps I bought an old rangefinder 35mm compact in a junk shop, f3.5-f16, shutter 1s-1/300th. Used it with an exposure meter. Uncoated rather soft lens with some tiny bubbles in it. The shutter stopped working after a few years. But it taught me the basics of manual metered photography.

1966 Acquired old Voigtlander Brillant. 120 film. Lens f4.5-16, shutter 1s-1/300th plus B & T. Acquired cheap tripod. Bought minimal dark room kit and did own developing and contact printing. That camera took the first photographs of my new born son.

1970 Olympus 35RC, which I guessed was as good a 35mm compact for the serious amateur as could be got with a fixed non-zoom lens. (Turned out I may well have been right.) Acquired cheap Gnome enlarger and two remote programmable flashes. Started doing colour. Started doing small amounts of commercial work for friends for enough cash to buy new kit. The work was mostly shop product and art portfolio work for painters and sculptors. The new kit eventually became the next camera.

1977 Minolta XG9. Continued to do small amounts of paid photography for friends to finance extra photography kit, e.g. "I'll need a good tripod for those photographs, so I'll do them for the cost of the tripod." Ended up with a fairly comprehensive collection of lenses, flashes, and brollies. Eventually shifted entirely to colour and stopped doing my own developing and enlarging.

[1981 A coincidence of work and photography: I became a contract researcher on a digital photography robotics project at Edinburgh University, so I acquired a good grounding in the elementary basics of digital photography before digital cameras existed.]

2002 Bought a cheap rubbish 2MP digital camera to see what they were like. Despite somewhat fogged and smeared A5 prints, was very impressed with digital convenience and cheapness.

2004 Canon Powershot A300 3.1MP digital camera. Intended as a trial digital replacement for the Olympus 35RC, which in terms of image quality up to A5 it certainly was, and sometimes up to A4 enlargements if you didn't look too closely. I had made the mistake of listening to my wife's pleas to lend my beloved Olympus to her, since she'd lost her own camera and was off on holiday. She's had far more cameras than me because she loses them. She swore she'd guard the Olympus with her life. She left it on top of a mountain.

I had hoped the Canon Powershot A300's range of semi-manual control options would effectively amount to full manual control, which they didn't quite.

2007 Sony DSC-R1 10MP digital camera. I had intended to buy a good second hand 5-6MP P&S with full manual and a high quality zoom. I wanted a general purpose digital camera capable of A4 enlargements with which to learn the crafts of digital photography until DSLRs got both better and cheaper. While looking I came across a second hand R1 with a nearly full box of accessories, which looked good enough to get me into DSLR image quality territory at a bargain price. Now retired and with a lot more free time I decided to take up photography more seriously.

The R1 is an interesting and eccentric engineering compromise, and that kind of thing always attracts me. One learns more from eccentric things. I probably don't want more than 5 good megapixels in my photos, but having 10 in the camera gives useful cropping latitude.

It lacks the action photo capabilities of a good DSLR, but since I prefer photographing things which stay there while I fiddle about getting things right that's not an important issue. I say "amateur" photographer because I earned my living in a non-photographic fashion, although I did sometimes take commissions to photograph products and art works.

2008 An accident to the R1 convinced me a serious photographer needed two cameras. I seriously considered another R1 as backup, but had been reading reviews of the new Sony Alpha 350 which shared some of the R1 philosophy. So I decided to take the opportunity to extend the range of focal lengths which the R1 could reach. So I acquired a Sony Alpha 350 with a 10-20mm and an 18-250mm zoom. A relatively cheap elevation into a wider range of photographic possibilities, i.e. more pixels and more zoom!

2009 Extended available light aperture range with a 50mm f1.4 lens. Extended tele with a 500mm f8. Both require very exact focus and showed the A350 to have slight backfocus. Corrected this by using the AF sensor plane adjustment bolts.
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Rights to any of the digital imagery in my pages here are negotiable, and prints can be ordered.

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