RebsieFairholm's photostream  

Graphic designer now running my own small publishing company. Veteran of Pershore Camera Club in the days when it was all about sloshing trays of chemicals around on the kitchen worktop with a sheet of black polythene taped over the window.

I was always obsessed with photography, but it kicked off in my teens when a friend's dad gave me an old 1960s Praktica SLR which had been wallowing in his loft for years. It was completely manual (although it had some primitive metering) and it taught me everything I ever needed to know about f-stops, depth of field, exposures and shutter speeds – skills which I'm very glad to have even if they seem a bit redundant in the digital age. I now use a Nikon D40 which I love but the old skills still come in handy when I want to make use of the old Nikkor manual focus lenses which don't meter on the D40 (I still can't get used to the fact that modern lenses don't have an aperture ring).

So I'm really quite an experienced photographer, but am deeply humbled by the quality of work I see others posting on Flickr – and am constantly learning from it and being inspired by it.

These days I photograph plants and vegetables in relation to my work with plant breeding and vegetable biodiversity. My pictures have been published in various magazines including the Soil Association's "Living Earth" magazine and publicity materials for Garden Organic and the Heritage Seed Library. You can follow my horticultural experiments at daughterofthesoil.blogspot.com. I also take pictures of architecture and historic bits and bobs around my home town of Cheltenham, only a fraction of which are uploaded here (there's loads). Some of them end up on my local history website, Cheltonia. cheltonia.wordpress.com

Most of what you see in my stream was taken with the Nikon D40, apart from the ones scanned from film photographs which were mostly taken with a Nikon F301. I only have a few simple toys:
Nikkor 50mm f/2
Nikkor 135mm f/2.8 (lovely clunky early 1970s job, weighs a ton)
Hoya R72 infrared filter
Photoshop CS5
Photomatix (which I try to use with restraint)

... and an old Rolleicord TLR camera which I should use more often.