I am an amateur photographer based in Cheshire, UK. Although I have taken photos for many years, its only in the last couple of years that I have taken a more active approach to the creative process and improving my output. This website has been developed to share some of my favourite photos I have taken since 2019 and which I think demonstrate how I have progressed. I mainly shoot locally to home, but also in North Wales and the Peak District.
My first SLR camera which I bought after my first monthly wage as a lab technician in the Zoology department at Keele University.
My first photo taken with the Minolta X-300 taken in the grounds of Keele University during my lunch break
I started taking photos when I bought my first film SLR camera, a Minolta X-300 back in 1983. The first image I ever took was the landscape photo below, a scene in the grounds of Keele University, where I used to work as a lab technician. Most of the photos taken with this camera were a mixture of landscape, travel and family photos and I never ventured beyond the automatic camera settings to get the shot.
I moved on to Digital SLR cameras starting in 2006 with a Canon 350D, then a Canon 550D in 2011 and a Canon 80D in 2019.
In 2019, with more time to devote to photography, I began to think more about the creative process. That involved getting more out of my equipment using manual settings and trying out post processing techniques. With the Canon 80D, I began to shoot in RAW format, and use advanced image editing software such as Affinity Photo and Luminar. Its also been extremely useful to get tips from YouTube photographers, in particular, Nigel Danson, James Popsys, Simon Baxter and Thomas Heaton to name a few.
Towards the end of 2020 I felt I had more confidence with manual settings and image editing software and so decided it was time to upgrade my photography equipment. I know more expensive equipment doesn’t translate to better quality images, but I wanted to explore the benefits of a full frame mirrorless camera for myself, knowing I had much more technical knowledge and post processing experience developed over the past couple of years.
This has meant a switch from Canon cameras, which I have been very familiar with over the past 15 years, to Sony, with the purchase of their latest Alpha 7IV full frame mirrorless camera.
At the beginning of 2020 I also thought it would be fun to expand my photographic capabilities with a drone. The attraction of the drone is to get photos from different perspectives that I can’t get access to on the ground. I have started off with a DJI Mavic Mini 2, which is probably the best drone with the least restrictive usage laws in the UK. The quality of images is great for the size of the drone, but it can’t compete with those from the Canon or Sony cameras. I have also played around with shooting video with the drone and editing the output into short movies using LumaFusion on the iPad.
I have built this website to share some of my photos taken with cameras and drone over the past couple of years. As I start to gain experience with the new Sony camera and a move to image editing using Adobe Lightroom, I aim to expand the number of photos on the website and develop a photographic style which is recognisable to me.
Thanks for visiting
Jonathan