About

Hi there – just a few brief words about me and my photography

After 40 years in Book Publishing I retired in December 2019 but continue to act as a consultant and still enjoy mentoring Publishing MA students in amongst the pleasures of more leisure hours and time with my grandkids.

I first became interested in photography at the age of 12 when I received a trusty old Zenit E SLR as a birthday present – and I have never lost the bug since that day.

As you will see from my website, it is landscape photography that is my true love and passion. There is something zen-like in wandering around a brand-new location – waiting for the right light to fall, looking for shapes and designs, and just losing oneself in the moment of trying to recreate in the viewfinder the magic there in front of you.

My cameras are very much a part of my love of photography, and I currently own over 30 digital and film SLRs and compacts. They were nearly all bought second-hand, and I enjoy trying to create images that please me on older, simpler models rather than the latest all singing–all dancing computers that manufacturers persuade us we ‘must have’.

For the last few years my camera of choice has been an original Canon 5D ‘Classic’ full-frame digital SLR with its lack of modern technologies like vide and live view – and the famously crappy rear LCD screen and low pixel count – but there is something about its simplicity of operation and feel in the hands that reminds me of my old manual SLRs: it slows you down and helps you concentrate on the basics of composition, aperture and speed. For my kind of photography, that’s all I need. The pictures that come out of it just seem to ‘pop’, and that’s why I keep coming back to it.

My photographs are for my own enjoyment and pleasure in remembering the moment of what I was trying to achieve on that day with that particular scene. They reignite specific memories and feelings in me, and that is their true power and joy. Every single one could of course be so much better, but even with their simple failings they still remind me of moments past – but now, happily, not forgotten.

Finally, a special word of thanks must go to Jocelyn Pontes, who persuaded me to extract these many photographs from their ‘dusty’ hard-drives and to organise them and put them here on show. She also built and designed my website, and I will always be so grateful to her for reigniting the hundreds of special memories that these photos bring back to me.

–Andrew