Ian Billenness' photostream  

A Photographic History

If like me you are over 30 (ah hmmm...) this may mean something to you, otherwise it will be complete gibberish.

My first serious attempts at photography began more than 30 years ago when at the age of 14 my parents kindly bought me what now seems an archaic Olympus OM10 SLR, this was of course a film (a long strip of light sensitive material capable of taking 24 or 36 photographs) camera, with manual focus and manual film advance, yes that's right you had to push a lever to manually advance the film ready for the next shot and then twiddle the lens to get things in focus. It was fitted with a Zuiko 50mm F1.8 lens which rather ironically remains to this day one of the fastest lens I have ever owned ! and one of the sharpest. I have still have a print from the first roll of film that I ran through the camera. Thinking back now it amazes me that I had the patience to take up photography given that in those days the gap between capture and print was typically around 2 weeks. How things have changed, 30 years on and a photograph I take can be view by millions (as if !) on my Flickr account within minutes of capture. I wonder how popular photography would be today were it not for the instant digital gratification ? Mind you I think the world could happily exist without camera phones...

I persisted with the OM10 until 1987 when the great lure of “Autofocus” tempted me to splash out on a Canon EOS 650, Canon’s first autofocus SLR, and so the EOS and EF lens story began, as did the story of 100’s of out of focus photographs !

After an 8 year stint with the 650 ( I can’t imagine sticking with a camera for 8 years nowadays) it was time for an upgrade, this time to the Canon EOS 50E, the “E” stood for eye-focus, an amazing system designed by Canon whereby you simply looked at the focus point in the viewfinder that you wanted to focus on and bingo the camera would light up the focus confirmation light. It was a system that worked wonderfully for some and not at all for others. For me it worked well and I bought a second 50E body, one for slow film and one for fast film (not as simple as changing iso or asa as it was in those days). The 50E was a great camera and coupled with Fuji Velvia 50 or Kodak Kodachrome 64 produced some fantastic shots (transparency / slide film was so much better than negative / print film).

Great though transparency film was, it was of course not easy to view your results, short of going to the huge expense of cibachrome prints (although they really were superb) and thus eventually like most shooters I succumbed to the digital age first with a few point and shoots and then with a Canon EOS 20D to be followed by a 40D and now a 7D and 5D Mk II.

My first love has always been landscape photography. More recently an increasing interest in wildlife watching has lead me to dabble in wildlife and in particular bird photography for which the crop sensor dslrs’ are particularly well suited.

My photography tends to revolve around the various trips that I have taken to places like Yosemite, the Canadian Rockies, Hong Kong, Western Australia, Iceland, South Africa and Namibia. Unfortunately many of those trips were taken before the digital age and it remains a pending task to digitise the many thousands of transparencies that I have shot.

Still plenty more places to see: