To quote Kodak Alaris "Kodak Professional Portra 800 Film delivers well balanced color saturation, very fine grain, and best-in-class underexposure latitude. This film is ideal for long lenses and low light situations". Myself, I use its versatility and characteristics for quite a different application...

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Winter officially begins with the Winter Solstice, when the Sun is directly overhead the Tropic of Capricorn. This year this occurred on the 21 December. In reality though the really cold weather around here doesn't really set in until January/February each year.

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A Christmas Fayre in the streets of Milestones. Traditional Xmas market stalls in the comfort of the huge indoor heritage museum, no rain, no wind, warm and dry. Joyful!

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Father Christmas on his sleigh or rather his motorised float with his Rotarian helpers driving round our village collecting on behalf of worthy causes at this festive season of the year. 

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The London Transport Museum is a place "which explores the heritage of London and its transport system, and the stories of the people who have travelled and worked in the city over the last 200 years" and for photographic fun. 

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Toad of Toad Hall. Pictures taken at an exhibition in very low light indeed on a Voigtländer Nokton 17.5mm f0.95 Aspherical lens wide open. A light giant indeed.

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Traction engine rally in early summer at Eastnor Castle. Steam, smoke and clanking of heavy metal. Most evocative of bygone times.

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Walking about the gardens in the snow. It's cold and you have to work quickly. The images look almost B&W but they are in colour honestly if you look carefully. They are simply a reflection of the chilly conditions and the light.

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Along the river on lovely autumn day with the sun shining out of a blue sky for once. When this happens grab your camera and take advantage whilst you may for it's sure not to last and it didn't! While it did, the river reflected the beautiful blue light; gorgeous!

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Santa comes but once a year maybe as the old saying goes, but these days Xmas marketing goes on for around two months before the big day especially with the annual displays in the local garden centres.

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A different wood this time with Red Maple, European Maple, English Oak as well as the ubiquitous Beech. A mixed deciduous wood, more spectacular in many ways.

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The Olympus PEN-F will be ten years old in February 2026, yet it remains a highly desirable camera to this day despite its decade old tech. I still love and use mine...

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Amongst the beech trees, the splendours of autumn, glorious colours, enriched by the diffused light of a bright but cloudy day. Also great to photograph in late October and early November.

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Living on the edge. Skill and courage against a force of nature. Adrenalin pumping huge fun. Woo hoo... a case for always carrying your camera as I came across these guys practicing their white water skills, in the very rough water to be found at the bottom of a weir after heavy rain, when walking down the Thames Path one day. Serendipity!

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With the clocks having now gone back an hour last Sunday marking the end of British Summer Time and as we head into the dark days before Christmas, now is the time to sharpen up our skills in nighttime photography. Heading out, camera in hand, into the darkness 🎃!

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The SVR, Severn Valley Railway, where there is only one location where you can get trackside looking pictures without actually going trackside.

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Autumn splendour; reds, golds, bronzes and yellows. The promised glory by Forestry England made manifest, the photographer's delight. This is what colour photography was made for and this is the season I revel in. I am the October Man as you might say.

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An enormous art installation in Winchester Cathedral representing the potential impact of climate change on the UK's flora. Eye-catching most certainly, you could hardly miss it, if a little incongruous in such a location maybe? I must admit that at first I thought someone had been fly tipping.

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60007 Sir Nigel Gresley on a cold, wet day in October. A superb example of an LNER A4 Pacific in preservation. Photographed early in the morning in a less than perfect aspect, in very less than perfect conditions. It was a great pleasure to see and experience it never-the-less.

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Portraits at STEAM; times gone by on the GWR, when engines were steam powered, the railway was "wonderful", travellers were real passengers and not just "customers" or merely "consumers" and having a ticket was a contract between you and the original GWR company that meant something.

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The autumn leaves display is just beginning for this year with bright reds, yellows, bronzes and gold colours which will continue to appear on our trees and shrubs over the next few weeks. According to Forestry England the autumn tree display is expected to be even more vibrant this year because of the very warm and sunny summer we have just experienced.

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I have a predilection for fast prime lenses and today I took a couple of them walkabout with me on a low light museum wander. They are perfect for this sort of work. I love the combination of speed, quality, compactness and mobility that you still can't get from zooms. Primes, my first and still my true love really if I am honest...

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My Olympus M.Zuiko Digital ED 12mm f/2 is a high-grade, all-metal, fast wide-angle lens for my Micro Four Thirds system with crop frame angle of view equivalent to a 24mm lens in a 35mm format. It is a jewel of a lens, fast, compact, easy to carry and of high optical quality, which makes it a pleasure to use...

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The recent heatwave leading to three very interesting sunsets on consecutive evenings but with very varied atmospheric conditions leading in turn to startlingly different compositions of the setting sun...

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The Panasonic Leica DG Summilux 9mm f1.7 ASPH the only real choice if you want an AF, rectilinear, ultra wide (18mm crop factor equivalent), fast prime for your MFT format camera. Luckily it's a 'good un' and, belying the Leica branding, comes at an affordable price...

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The M.Zuiko 20mm f1.4 Pro prime lens from OM System is a bit of a goody especially when paired with their OM-3 camera. I had mine with me on a 'one camera with one lens' trip out recently to an excellent garden centre which is a bit of a trek away but worth the effort...

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Another OM System camera, this time the delectable OM-3 bought used in a moment of madness but with no regrets as this a fabulous instrument with a retro vibe but all the best tech including the latest imaging pipe from the flagship OM-1 II but in a more compact, portable body with the addition of a Creative Dial lifted from the long discontinued Olympus Pen-F which now has a cult following. ...

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The procession of heatwaves we have experienced this summer has been good for one particular species of insect I am very pleased to say, namely the butterfly. They are in need of a big boost such as we have seen this year and many more to follow hopefully. ...

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So I said I might take my OM-5 II out on its first outing to do steam trains but in the end I decided instead to do flowers. A bit of tele-zoom close-up work using my 40-150mm f4 Pro. Thought it would be a good test of the camera lens combo and so it proved. ...

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I love heritage steam railways. There is nothing like them. In particular there is nothing like heritage steam locomotives with their sights, sounds and smells of yesteryear. Somehow living machines, fiery dragons when they are in steam with a life of their own ...

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A fabulous photo day out at Marwell Zoo which occupies the grounds of the former Marwell Manor and where the old house itself Marwell Hall, with its connection to Jane Seymour of Henry VIII fame, still stands ...

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Coddiwomple; USA colloquial: verb: to travel in a purposeful manner towards a vague destination ...

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Quite often when I want to capture great close-ups of one of my favourite subjects, flowers, there is a challenge to be able to approach them physically close enough to use a traditional macro lens. That's when I reach for a closer focusing tele-zoom lens like my 40-150mm f4 Pro (80-300mm crop factor equivalent) used typically on my ultra compact OM-5 MFT camera and start making tele-zoom close-ups ...

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Do lenses have to be razor sharp to create interesting images? No! Thus do images, by extension, have to be sharp to be interesting? Absolutely not, indeed sometimes by preference not. Plus what is sharpness anyway? It is after all a perception, not an absolute and thus subject to interpretation ...

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I loathe post processing, adjusting settings, moving sliders back and forth, masking, zooming in and out, spending endless hours editing and previewing images in front of a computer screen is a huge pain. It is one contributing factor as to why I don't use digital much and continue to use mostly film for my photography ...

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Twenty five years on, I still love my Contax G2 electronic rangefinder 35mm film camera outfit. With a body and lenses wrapped in titanium, a clever combination electronic rangefinder plus an exceptional set of Zeiss prime lenses, the G2 system has not been equalled in all the long years since its introduction. It remains peerless ...

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There is an old saw about there being three types of people in the world, "the Wills, the Won'ts and the Can'ts", which is equally applicable to each of us in the photog domain ...

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Jouissance: noun: physical or intellectual pleasure or delight. For instance that engendered by engaging in the art of taking photographs, of capturing moments, the time spent behind the camera...

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I have a love of photographing places, devoid of people, using the technique of absent presence as I have said before. So why do people insist on stepping into shot?

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Jokul Frosti or Jack Frost (my namesake) to you and me, painting the trees with a deep hoar frost on a dull old day. Don't be a fair weather photographer as many of the best opportunities for interesting pictures present themselves in less than clement weather.

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I have an approach to the photographic art which can best be defined as going walkabout with my vision switched on and my camera in hand. It fits perfectly with my genre of photography, that of representing the genius loci of places I like to explore.

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When I manage to make a photograph that is pleasing to my eye, for whatever reason, and I sit and admire its tones, textures, shapes, forms, use of light and all the rest of the gubbins then often a sobering thought will cross my mind.

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There is much written about the 'rules' of composition, long lists like the top ten, fifteen, twenty tips of great composition. Who can remember them all? We need something much simpler for practical use.

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I like using film, accordingly I like using my F80 with which to shoot it, I also like using my Nikon prime lenses that go with my F80. I really like the end results I create with them. What's not to like?

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Turns out one of my favourite lenses to use with my F80 film camera has become my 85mm f1.8. This so called portrait or short telephoto lens seems to fit with my "minds eye" vision which often tends to mentally crop out the near foreground of a scene to focus in on a subject.

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Anyone who knows me well understands that I am a bit of a 35mm rangefinder camera aficionado, favouring cameras from the likes of Contax, Zeiss and Leica, constructed of such materials as titanium, magnesium and duraluminium alloys. So it may come as a bit of surprise that one of my favourite film cameras in my collection is an SLR, in fact a Nikon F80, made extensively out of engineering grade polycarbonate which is camera marketing department speak for plastic.

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As I was sitting here this morning chatting about the disposable nature of modern digital media. The consensus was that everything has become commoditised, short lived, transient in value. In respect of photography, in the early days a real photograph was a precious physical item requiring time, money and skill to produce. It was a highly valued, treasured thing of longevity. Now we create millions of digital images all the time mostly of little consequence, quickly forgotten and lost in the profusion of the many. Digital photos are simply disposable items of fleeting value.

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It's that time of year once more, when the bluebells appear in swathes in ancient woodland with their heady wild hyacinth scent and lovely deep blue-violet flowers. Mind you a few can have white or pink flowers too but mostly they are blue. They are a photographers delight but also provide a great challenge to capture their true colour just right!

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Wandering around Milestones once more, travelling light with my RX100 VII compact camera demonstrating its impressive capabilities in some very low level light conditions typical of most museums, designed to help conserve the colours of many of their precious historical artefacts.

Amazing the quality that can be squeezed out of a 1" sensor camera.

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One of the very best 21mm lenses ever made is the Zeiss Biogon 21mm f2.8 designed for the Contax G Series of cameras. In a world where superlatives are vastly overused and thus devalued, this lens is genuinely stunning.. ...

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There has recently been a big resurgence of interest in compact digital cameras just at the point when most of the big makers have got out of the business of making them having made the judgment that the market for them was dead! Those who have kept the faith continue to clean up as a result and the used market is booming for these little beasties as a result as well. As for me I still have and continue to use with much enthusiasm my lovely little Sony RX100 VII, last of their now discontinued compact camera series!

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As with many museums these days Milestones, whilst still delightful, is not what it once was. Time was when it transported us into a world of yesterday, evocative of a bygone era of local industrial heritage and how we used to live. Now it has succumbed to the modern need to provide endless "what's on experiences", to be a place of "child friendly" entertainment, to be big event driven. Heritage watered down, oh dear!

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