Bio

At the age of fourteen I was introduced to the excitement of photography and the darkroom. I was soon taking my own photos, making black-and-white contact prints in the basement of my parents’ home. There is something magical about watching an image come to life before your eyes in a tray of developer.

Not ready for the challenge of making colour prints, I moved to colour slide film and the advantages of using a single-lens reflex camera. This satisfied the creative beast within – but you can’t really carry slides around to show pictures of your children, or offer a slide show in broad daylight. Making prints from slides was expensive, so colour negative film found its way into my camera more and more often.

Finding photo opportunities was easy, but the SLR was bulky. The next step was to buy a compact 35 mm camera and share my photographs using both prints and a compact disc. Since my pictures were being transferred to discs from film, why not try digital photography and cut out the film? So now I usually use a digital camera, keeping the faithful film SLR for those really serious photo shoots when film still seems most appropriate.

Bob Robertson