about

A native of Nothern Ireland, I’m a clinical pharmacist and biotechnologist by trade, my passion has always been photography. I caught the bug from my father who shot on Kodachrome 35mm slide film and also made 16mm movies. He produced tourist films of our home town and as Chairman of the local council he marketed our beautiful little seaside town of Portrush with a certain flare and originality!

I began my journey in photography with a black body Nikon FE2, a 24mm wide angle, graduated to a 500mm Tokina mirror lens (remember those?) and a used a Tamron medium zoom for ‘normal’ stuff.

I shot mostly on Kodachrome like my Dad and later Fujichrome. I preferred the Fuji colours, so it’s no wonder that when I came back to photography, many years later, I opted for Fuji kit. It just felt right, analogue in a digital age!

So what’s in my camera bag…

Cameras

• Fuji X-T5

• Fuji XT100V

Lenses

• FUJINON XF8-16mm F2.8 R LM WR

• FUJINON XF16-55mm F2.8 R LM WR

• FUJINON XF50-140mm F2.8 R LM OIS WR

• FUJINON XF150-600mm F5.6-8 R LM OIS WR

• FUJINON XF80mm F2.8 R LM OIS WR Macro

• FUJINON XF23mm F2 R WR

Accessories

I use Godox flash units and have a couple of V1s with the little accessory kit which has most things you would ever need, plus, I confess to having bought far to many gadgets and accessories during lockdown and probably won’t ever use half of them! That said, I can now kit out a mini studio with stands, lights, light boxes, a bunch of tripods and assorted bits and pieces.

I am a Peak Design fanboy (I know) so I have the obligatory camera bag, travel tripod, wrist strap and Capture clip, which are pricy for what they are, but do work for me (or that’s what I tell myself).

Workflow

I shoot in RAW, manage my images in Lightroom Classic, edit with Capture One, DXO Pure Raw, DXO PhotoLab and Photoshop. I have tried them all and ironically no one package has everything, so I end up jumping back and forth in all of them (nightmare!). But, if pushed I prefer DXO’s workflow with it’s Nik Collection integration, that said, Lightroom in its latest incarnation is just stellar and of course Capture One renders Fuji raw files so beautifully , a tough one!

Then there is Helicon Focus for stacking macro shots and Topaz Photo AI which is best in class for reclaiming image quality - whether raw, tiff , dng or jpegs - and will clean up high ISO grabs with style and class!

A great example of my use case is where I have digitised many of my old 35mm slides. I re-photograph them using a JJC Film Digitising Adapter and LED Light Set and then push the RAW images through Topaz Photo AI and polish them up in post with DXO PhotoLab, and to be honest, the results are staggering. More of that in the blog.

Lastly, I backup all my images, as shot and then edited, on a Raid 1, dual hard disk system and then backup the lot up to the cloud for the ‘belt and braces’ peace of mind that gives you. I could go on but you get the gist I’m sure.

Printing

I love printing my ‘bangers’ (as my son calls them) and I invested in a Canon PRO-1000 professional grade printer which can print everything up to A2 size. I use Hahnemühle fine art papers and Canon’s Professional Print and Layout application to load and print the images.

An expensive luxury for sure, but there’s nothing quite like it, watching your carefully edited images emerge from the printer! They say all photographers should print their work and I agree!