About seadipper / Henry Law  

Living in Brighton but spend about one-third of the year in Sweden.

Apart from swimming in the sea & taking photographs, I never stayed doing the same thing for long. Most jobs I had - town planning and design - involved taking photographs but I did not need to take as many as I actually did, and six books of my negatives ended up the Lewisham local history archive.

I like to use photography as a means of protest so a lot of my stuff is not artistic but is intended as a means of stirring things up, especially locally, to get them changed. Other pictures are purely for technical interest and record and make no claim to be of artistic value.

I have used a wide variety of cameras, starting with a Box Brownie 120, and including a Selfix 820, Super Ikonta 531 6x9, Linhof Technika 6x7, Leica M, Nikon F2/F3, Olympus Trip and XA and Canonet, and the camera on my mobile phone, which is useful for pictures of street rubbish etc as they can be emailed straight to the council and local paper and the subjects aren't worth wasting film on. It is also a challenge to take reasonable pictures with it

Most of my flickr pictures are either scanned from prints or from negative, all black and white is shot on black and white film. I use minimal processing - adjust brightness, saturation, contrast, gamma, straighten and perhaps correct converging verticals.

After much hesitation, I obtained a digital camera (Canon Ixus 750). I had no great expectations of it but found it had its uses. The main disadvantages were battery life (short), camera life (also short), horrible barrel distortion, poor contrast range and inability to pick up contrasty detail such as winter trees against the sky. It was also slow to fire, and complex to use in other than point-and-shoot mode. And it gave blurry pictures at shutter speeds of slower than 1/100 second. Happily it is no more.

Eventually I replaced it with a Ricoh waterproof one. This is good and robust with the mechanism fully enclosed. The picture quality is so-so with poor dynamic range and iffy auto-focus but it is at least a camera I can keep with me all the time and take into wind, rain and sea spray. The best of cameras is useless if it is left permanently indoors. But for decent quality photographs I use an MP Leica and a Nikon F3.

Buddyicon by lomokevs bike
www.flickr.com/photos/lomokevs_bike/2918210518/in/set-721...

Email henry.bn(at)gmail.com


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