About me
About Me
If you are interested, this is how I became interested in photography.
About me
My interest in photography was sparked by my grandad who had been a keen photographer since the 1920s. When I was 14 (in 1972) he gave me my first camera which was a Kodak Retina 1B. He taught me all about f-stops and depth of field, and about ISO numbers and film contrast. I would go off and take pictures, we’d get them developed, and then he would give me lots of feedback on composition and exposure of my pictures. He was a pretty harsh critic, not averse to bursting into laughter at my efforts! But I learned a lot from him. When I was 16 he gave me the basics of a darkroom set-up and I started to develop my own films in our bathroom at home. Something my parents were not very keen on. When I went to University I joined the camera club and this gave me access to more sophisticated darkroom kit. So I spent many hours there developing films and generating black and white prints mostly using Ilford FP4 film and Ilford paper. Unfortunately, my grandad died in the second year I was at university. He left me all his camera gear which included two retina 3C rangefinders – which is one of the only rangefinder cameras with interchangeable lenses. I still have all the cameras he gave me and their lenses. They are a nostalgic link to him and his enthusiasm for taking photos. I have a photo of him on the wall in my study at home. The picture to the left is him during World War One.
I really liked the rangefinder equipment my grandad had given me, but I longed for an SLR camera and so I saved up any money I got on birthdays and at Christmas, and pooled it with money I earned doing vacation jobs, and in the final year at university I bought a Nikon FE, which was the most expensive camera I could afford. I have been using Nikon gear ever since. Slowly I started to use colour instead of black and white. This became necessary once I graduated and had to leave the camera club as I no longer could access the darkroom. In the 1980s we made several memorable trips where I took lots of photos including Turkey (1985), Australia (1986) and northern Thailand (1989). These photos are all still in negatives and prints, and not in the galleries, but I will try to convert them at some point and display them.
I stayed using film long after most people had converted to digital. In 2005 we made our first trip to China and I took so many pictures at the great wall, the terracotta warriors and the limestone karst in Guilin, that my luggage had an enormous bag of film canisters in it by the time we went home. This was extremely risky because the power of airport x-ray scanners at the time was sufficient to completely fog film if the cannisters went through several scanners before development. Partly because of this risk, in 2007, I finally took the plunge and bought a D40 digital format Nikon. I then upgraded this kit every 4 years or so until by 2017 I had a D800. I took lots of pictures during this period in China, where we moved to semi-permanently in 2011, and where we have travelled extensively. This included many pictures on the Tibetan plateau where I visited every 3-4 months for several years. One of the galleries is of the local Tibetan people some of whom owned the land where we worked. All these images were taken with consent of the people in the photos.
Probably the biggest change to the subjects I could successfully photograph, however, came in 2021 when I bought a 600mm f4 Nikkor lens. This was nothing short of transformational. Particularly for taking pictures of birds and other animals. I just love to hide among the rocks along the foreshore with this equipment waiting for the tide to push wading birds closer and closer. Several of the galleries include such pictures. I had my first exhibition of bird pictures in Shenzhen, China, along with three other local photographers during the summer of 2023. Some of my pictures from this exhibition are in the bird gallery.
The latest equipment change in my photography life has been to buy a Z9 camera and go mirrorless. I’m still getting used to this change, but being able to have shutter speeds as fast as 1/32,000th of a second is amazing.
Things have changed enormously over the time I have been taking photos. Technological advances have been remarkable – especially the digital and now mirrorless revolutions. But also one of the biggest changes is the weight of the equipment. My retina 1B weighed only 250g while my Z9 and 600mm lens together weigh almost 4 kgs! (and that excludes the tripod). But I guess in the end the difference in the quality of the images makes carrying the kit worth it.
I really hope you enjoy looking at the pictures in these galleries as much as I enjoyed taking them and selecting them to display here.
John Speakman
if you have any comments on the pictures or the site then please contact me
