Home :: About

When did I take my first photograph? Who knows, and I doubt there are many people who can claim to remember such things. I know for certain I had a camera when I was about six or seven years old. A Hanimex VEF that I used while on holiday in Mablethorpe, Lincolnshire. My mother still has those first photographs.

Once hitting the heights of nine years old, I was upgraded, if you can call it that, to a Hanimex DFT Tele. This slim line camera was great while I was at school, and it saw many a school outing in the early 1980's, until I lost it in Sherwood Forest. My photography took a backseat for the next few years, school and college taking all my time, but I still had a few cameras over the years, including my first 135mm camera which was a Kodak. I forget the model, mainly because it was rubbish. I really hit the big time, with the purchase of the Olympus MJU, when it first became available in 1991. £119 worth of camera, and I loved it. I think I got through four rolls of film on one day when I got it. Sadly times got rough just a couple of years later, and I was forced to sell it. I think I got about £30 for it. I was distraught... it was in A1 condition, but I had little choice.

It was quiet again until about 1996 when I got my first digital camera, a FinePix 1300. Wow! Instant results - no more waiting 48 hours for film processing only to find 50% of the pictures were terrible. I got a couple of years use out of this, and stupidly sold it to buy a Panasonic something-or-other. I'm pretty sure it wasn't a Lumix, because it was just terrible. This was quickly sold off, and I went back to Fujifilm, and their Finepix 4800 Zoom. A great little camera, but this itself only last about a year when I went a step higher to the Finepix S7000 Zoom, a pro-sumer camera. One of those that looks like a DSLR but isn't. Again, I tired of not having the control I wanted, so again, it was sold not even a year old.

Now I'm using a Canon 350D DSLR, that was purchased in June of 2005. This camera has had plenty of use now, almost hitting 10,000 frames, and a small selection of lenses.

All the photographs on this site have been captured using this equipment.

Living in Chesterfield, just 10 minutes from the Peak District, the national park makes an ideal subject for the majority of my photography. All the photographs are taken within the boundary of the national park, but there is also a section for some of my favourite images from outside the area.

All the photographs are reduced in quality to 72 dpi for internet purposes, but all the images are archived at a much higher resolution suitable for printing purposes.

If you would like to purchase a high quality print of one of my photographs, please visit my PhotoBox Pro Gallery.

Thanks for visiting Peak District Scenes, and remember you can keep track of where I've been out shooting on the Peak District Scenes blog, and you can upload your own photographs to the companion group in Flickr.

You can also see these and many more of my photographs in my public Flickr gallery.