[Fanfare of trumpets!]
It’s here! The first spin-off from this blog, my new photo book, is available at last. Yes, it’s been a well kept secret and been in gestation for quite some months, but eventually it’s here.
Here’s (some of) what I say in the Introduction:
I am fairly sure I took my first photographs with my father’s Kodak Box Brownie although I don’t know how old I was. But I do have a series of old 620 roll film images of my parents and I on holiday at a nudist club when I would have been around 9 or 10; and as the series contains one of my parents but not me, it seems reasonable to assume I took it. And I know had my first cheap camera by the time I was about 12.
I’ve been taking photographs on and off ever since. And that’s now 50 years … But this book is not really designed as a celebration of my 50 years taking photographs. It is intended only as a collection of images I like from the last few years …
I do not pretend that these are world-beating images. Nor would I claim to be an especially good photographer. I’ve had no formal photographic training, but learnt the basics at my father’s knee and by going to camera club with him as a teenager. It was more difficult then: we didn’t have cameras which did everything for us; exposures had to be calculated; every shot cost us real money to develop and print; and you had to wait days or even weeks to see your successes and failures. Like the rest of modern life photography is now cheap and instant.
My approach to photography has always been to take what I see; what interests, intrigues or amuses me. It is about trying to see things and make them into a picture …
Available now on Blurb. Not yet on Amazon, but it should be eventually.