About Photos | Chezstephens

History

Adrian has enjoyed photography in various forms throughout his life. While a youngster, he processed his own films and photographs using his parents’ dark-room. The film used was typically FP4 developed in Acutol. Enlarged with a Durst enlarger onto Ilford silk paper.

Many happy hours were spent enlarging, developing and fixing.

At University, he used photography as part of both undergraduate and postgraduate studies. As an undergraduate he had a Part II Nat. Sciences project involving movie photography of crack propagation in various transparent crystals. This included an explosive capsule firing a small tungsten ball at a crystal surface photographed by a rotating mirror “framing camera” capable of up to 1 million frames per second for 36 frames. Synchronisation was difficult to achieve, and most of the 3 films developed per day during this period were “duds”. As a graduate, his research was on chemical microanalysis using electron microscopes. Again, many more films – most of them not duds, and many many prints.

After all this excessive photography, when he finished university, photography was firmly relegated to snaps. His first camera was a Zenith M bought when he was about 19. His second camera was a Pentax Spotmatic F with a 50mm f1.4 lens. This was second-hand when he bought it in about 1982 (for about £100). He sold it on Ebay for £52.

Snapshots

Over the period of 1977-2000, Adrian took 3,000 pictures which were printed as 4×6″ or 5×7″ and are kept in 30 Flip-photo albums. Adrian acquired an HP Scanjet 5500c (with auto photo feeder) and scanned this entire collection.

Digital Photography

In 2001, for their wedding anniversary, they bought a Canon Digital Ixus II (Digital Elf) and started taking pictures in larger volume. The Digital Ixus is a very convenient camera as it slips into a bum-bag (fanny pack). Adrian took about 5,000 pictures with this camera over a period of 3 years.

In 2004, for their 25th wedding anniversary, Tina bought Adrian a Canon 300D (Digital Rebel), and Adrian bought a number of lenses for it on Ebay. His favourites were a 28-135 mm f3.5-4.5 image stablised lens and the indispensible 50mm F1.8. The latter is just perfect for indoor portraiture under available light, or where a shallow depth of focus is wanted. He has recently obtained a second-hand 28-75 f2.8 L, which will replace the 28-135 lens. This is an “L” series – sharper, brighter and more solid than the IS lens.

In roughly 2008, Adrian replaced the Canon 300D with a Canon 350D and added a 16-35 f2.8 L-series lens. This is now his favourite lens for “snapshots”.

In mid 2011, Adrian bought a Canon Kiss X4 (eos 450). The Canon 350D was relegated to 2nd camera, and was packed in luggage on trips. In 2016 it was stolen from his bags on the way back from Atlanta to London. In 2015, he bought a EF 70-200mm f4 L IS lens.

Photo Gallery

The results of this labour are all available in our photo gallery.
This contains the early scanned photos, the Digital Ixus photos and the more recent 300D/350D/450 photos.

Also, being blessed with three grandchildren – there are many photos of Luke, Holly and Mia. They will be well documented!

Gallery Software

Prior to 2014: Gallery is an excellent freeware package. See their homepage. It can be downloaded from sourceforge. I recently upgraded to Gallery 3, which is a significant improvement on the previous version. Gallery is programmed mainly in PHP.

After 2014: With the end-of-life of the Gallery package, I transferred to Piwigo as my photo gallery infrastructure. The transition was pretty painless, and I haven’t had any problems with it in the time I’ve been using it.