MrPhilDog's photostream  

Twitter = @mrphildog

I am co-creator (with The Wirral Bells) of www.creativephotobook.co.uk a non-commercial site with free photography articles... We like to call it an online photography book.

A Brief History of MrPhilDog

First the name - MrPhilDog: from Mr meaning Man, Phil being my name and Dog being the Chinese astrology year in which I was born. I am not a believer in astrology but I picked up the nickname Phildog during a visit to a friend's place in Singapore. Some friends inexplicably used to call me Mr Phil so I stuck the two things together and MrPhiDog (The man with one of the least imaginitive Flickr names) was born

When I started working in 1989 I worked in a bank; we had a guy that would come around every few weeks selling books to the staff. He'd leave the books for us to look at so we could decide if we wanted to buy any (people working in offices in the UK will probably be familiar with this concept - I don't know if it happens in other countries too). One week he left a big hardback book all about photography which had all sorts of information about apertures, shutter speeds, ISO numbers, composition and lighting etc. Having always had a casual interest in photographs I bought the book though I didn't even own my own camera at that point.

I read all of the book before I bought a camera so that I'd know what sort of camera I was looking for. In those days there wasn't much to chose between 35mm cameras in terms of features, auto focus wasn't that common or popular. If an SLR had an auto exposure mode like aperture priority it was fairly advanced.

Armed with my new found knowledge of the theory behind photography I went shopping for a 35mm SLR. As I had absolutely no photo equipment I bought myself a Pentax P30t kit which contained a Pentax P30t (obviously), a 28-80mm lens, an external flash (didn't have bounce) and a pentax camera bag.

I spent a while learning my new hobby while annoying my family by pointing a camera at them quite a lot; this is a habit that continues, in fact with the advent of digital photography I do this even more as film cost is no longer a consideration.

After annoying my family for a while I enrolled in a college class in photography in the evenings. During the course we got to use lots of darkroom equipment, studio flash, medium and large format cameras. Back then it seemed that people where divided between whether you were an Ilford HP5 film user or a Kodak T-Max deviant weirdo (Ilford for me if you can't tell) rather than whether you were a Nikon or Canon user.

We studied all aspects of photography, we studied the history, the technical skills, composition and even the chemical make up of film and photo paper.

I remember the first print I ever made in the darkroom. It was a silhouette of a tower with foreboding clouds behind it. I proudly took it to George, our photography teacher, for the inevitable "wow Phil, you should be teaching this class not me! That is amazing". Unfortunately back in the real word he looked at it and said "it's a bit flat and grey, it doesn't really do the picture justice". I was very disappointed at the time but he was right and as a result I learned to be more self critical and to push myself.

At the end of a 2 year part time course we sat an exam, submitted 3 pieces of coursework and I came away with a grade A Advanced Level (A-level) in photography.

After college I continued taking lots of photographs. One of my friends (a fellow flickr photographer "The Wirral Bells") had a darkroom in his loft. I used to go around there quite a bit where we enjoyed developing black and white film and prints. I do recall one day falling out of his loft while climbing into his darkroom on a ladder and loosing my footing at the top. Photography can be a dangerous business with all these chemicals and falling from great heights (well 7 feet or so).

I even considered being a full time photographer briefly. I shot a few weddings for friends (for free) and whilst the results were decent I hated the experience and decided that photography was a much better hobby than job.

By this time I had gathered a few extra accessories, I had a Pentax ME Super as a spare body and a handful of lenses. My favourite was the simple 50mm f/2 lens, I just loved the low depth of field I could get with it. But I ditched the whole lot for a Canon.

During my college years auto-focus was becoming more popular but what I was seeing wasn't impressing me until Canon came out with the EOS system with USM lenses. I realised that Autofocus was now fast and not hideously noisy anymore.

I bought a Canon EOS1000fn with a USM zoom lens. I honestly can't remember whether it was a 28-80 or a 35-105 but who cares... That camera didn't last very long in my possession as Canon brought out the EOS5 which was just beautiful. The eye controlled AF was great (for me at least - some people hated it) and the camera was just built fantastically. I loved that camera and took it all over the world with me. We went to Singapore, Thailand, all over Europe and to the USA together and it never let me down. Despite that I did look enviously at the EOS1n which was the choice of pros and I had this plan in the back of my mind to upgrade and never to need to upgrade again. However, just as autofocus had crept up on me digital photography was doing the same.

All of a sudden I realised that my EOS 5 was going to be worthless (almost at least) and that the EOS1n was not going to be the ultimate camera utopia I had anticipated.

Digital SLRs were just too expensive when this realisation dawned on me and film was losing its appeal to me. I could see the benefits I could be getting out of digital but couldn't justify the huge cost at that time. Maybe this was the reason my interest in photography just disappeared.

I eventually traded my EOS5 in for a digital compact to take pictures of my family (I was married with a kid by this stage). I bought a Fuji finepix f810 which was OK apart from the fact that I got 3 consecutive ones with dust on the sensor which could not be cleaned off like it could with a DSLR. I opened a Flickr account and uploaded some half hearted attempts at photos. I look back at them once in a while and consider deleting them as they are not very good but I leave them just because they are a reminder of how bad I got at photography for a while and they serve as a warning for me. :-)

The f810 didn't last too long. My interest in photography was coming back but I longed for a DSLR so I could get the control, low depth of field and low noise that I just couldn't get with my compact. So I bought an EOS350D and have never regretted it for a minute. It was like going back to the days when I got my P30t except now I could get decent pictures without having to climb into a darkroom and risk breaking limbs (see above).

I have since bought a 40D which I am enjoying a great deal.

After this long list of cameras from my history it may seem strange to read that I don't consider myself to be a gear freak. I don't enjoy endless debates about whether Nikon or Canon is the best; I can't stand people preaching about only buying "L" lenses and suchlike and I try to stay away from the obsessive pixel peeping and measuring that follows the release of every new camera.

At the same time I am a bit tired of the old cliche "it's not the camera its the photographer". Yeah, it's true a poor photographer won't take great pictures with a great camera but in the right hands a good camera will enable a good photographer to get better results than a poor camera will.

Most of the pictures I take are of my family and I don't put them on Flickr which I reserve for my more arty shots. :-) I don't favour any one style of photography, I am as happy taking abstracts as I am doing portraits or landscapes.

I still have boxes of Black and White negatives and colour transparencies that I'd like to digitise one day.



Please note: Recently a few of my pics have appeared on commercial websites without my permission.

Please respect the license agreements of my pictures. If you don't understand what license restrictions exist on a picture please ask.