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Ian and his photographic circle of life
I was mad keen on photography as early as a ten year old after reading a Time Life booklet on how to set up a black and white darkroom. I had to wait until school as a teenager before I had access to a darkroom. Naturally, I joined the school photographic society and eventually had a stint running it. I eventually expanded my repertoire to processing E4 (waving wet film in front of a light to reverse it!) and, later, E6 (chemical reversal) slide film and printing colour from slides and negatives.
After studying for a computer science degree I returned to the local camera store I used to have a summer job at and was soon managing it, later moving to the company's largest store in London. While I managed that store we won the Amateur Photographer Dealer of the Year award.
Cameras ranged from an old (and cheap model) Voigtlander, to borrowing Zenit Es, Praktica LTLs, a Minolta SRT101, an Olympus rangefinder compact, Minolta XE-1, Miranda dx-3, Sensorex-EE2, various Olympus OMs and, latterly, a Canon EOS-100 system. I've also trained to use Hasselblad equipment and as a camera (and darkroom) equipment salesman have had the luck to play with a lot of new and second hand kit of all shapes and sizes.
But I couldn't see a long term career in retail and decided to return to computing, firstly as a programmer and later as a journalist writing about IT. Of course digital imaging became key facet if IT and in the late 90s I found myself drawn back to photography, closing the circle 15 years after leaving the photography retail business.
I now write exclusively on digital photography topics for both UK-published photography magazines (in particular, What Digital Camera) and I started this site in August 2001.
DPNow is the long term future me and my wife, Julia, who does a lot of the under-the-skin work on the site.
Besides photography, my interests are very predictable: gadgets of all sorts, motor racing, especially F1, cooking, travel (over 40 countries to date and although I am based in the UK I was born in Australia to a Brit father and Filipina mother and lived in the Philippines, Indonesia and Malaysia as a child) and) and being a father to my two part time models, Elizabeth and Lara.
That about sums it up for now!
Ian
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