Who am I?
I am a hobbyist photographer, currently mostly covering sporting events such as local grass-roots football and working with East Midlands based goalkeeping brand GluPro, as well as being official photographer for the Heart of England taekwon-do schools across The Midlands.
Photography has been a serious part of my life since the late 1990’s in a variety of guises but always undertaken with passion for the art and love of the camera and the image. Ansel Adams famously said "the single most important component of a camera is the twelve inches behind it". It is easy to get swept away with modern technology as it takes its hold on photography and forget about our true aim as a photographer - the final image; capturing that moment never to be re-lived.
Don't get me wrong, I love cameras and lenses and all the other trappings and gubbins that go along with it but I do try to remain mindful of why I covet it all in the first place - the image.
I started out with a manual Olympus camera, a bag of lenses and a few rolls of film and that spark of something creative I hadn’t felt for some time – despite an academic route of Art & Design A-levels and college courses. In photography I felt I’d finally found the medium I had been searching for to take what I saw in my mind and convey it to the viewer. I loved the old Olympus but soon moved on to Nikon film cameras and, after owning a string of their fantastic SLR’s, moved to digital in 2004 – remaining loyal to the Nikon brand. Some of my older lenses have been part of my regular kit bag longer than some of my friends have walked the Earth. Don't get me wrong - I've dabbled with medium format and had and used a few lovely Bronica 645 and 6x6 camera kits over the years, as well as a Yashicamat 124G TLR camera, but my love of Nikon has always pulled me back to them.
With the help of local photography classes and a friend who was (and remains) a fantastic photographer I honed my skills in the black and white darkroom; swept up in the magic that is seeing an image appear on the paper after you’ve caringly nurtured it from the initial exposure on the film in your camera, hand-developed the film and then selected that particular frame from all others to turn a moment of captured light into a tangible look into your mind as seen through your eyes.
I spent several years working as a wedding photographer – both through helping local established practitioners and then later under my own name. I didn't do hundreds of weddings but I like to think that for those I did photograph I helped make the most special moments of the happy couple's lives into permanent records they could lovingly look back on for the rest of their days. I hope so.
As a true lover of photography, I’ve turned my hand to several styles and subjects over those years – wedding; portraiture; sport; events; wildlife and nature; landscape. Each treated with the same care and dedication as the next.
This site contains photographs from events and associated work, across most of those subjects. It is a selection of my photos that I am particularly fond of and feel sum up both my interests and abilities from that wide array of subjects.
I hope they capture some of my love of photography and you enjoy them as I do.
David