About

Welcome to the new home for my portfolio photographs.  

My name is David McAughtry, and I have been taking photographs on and off for 50 years.  I’m English and live south of the Thames in London. My career has been in science and technology and so I’m as interested in the technical challenges of photography as I am in the artistic ones. But the goal in the end is always the same –  to create interesting and visually pleasing images.  You can contact me here.

Like everybody these days I take thousands of photographs of family and friends, occasions and events and holidays, all with my phone camera.  I also take a different kind of photograph, one that’s designed to be looked at in a bit more detail, and that I have spent some time either composing or processing or both. The best of these is what I am showing in this portfolio site.

My main interests in photography are  birds in flight, street or people photography, long exposure photographs of spindly things like jetties in water, and landscape.  It’s a reasonably eclectic mix and not many photographers mix up for example the very long exposures needed for spindly things in water, with the incredibly short exposures needed to capture a bird in flight. The reason I do is because of my interest in the techniques and technologies required to get a good result.

Over the years as I’ve taken more and more photographs that at least I am happy with, I’ve struggled to find somewhere where friends and family and other people who might be interested can see them. I initially put them up on my main website, www.mcaughtry.com, but over time they got mixed up with other posts, making finding them difficult for anybody, let alone me to find them.

I then moved to Flickr, and built up a reasonable following of around 4000 at its peak, and 1.2m views to date (you can still see many of my photographs there) and here is my most popular image on Flickr, with nearly 24,000 views and almost 600 favorites.  By the way, it was taken with the ancient Olympus EP5, with a 16Mp sensor and really poor noise, at an aperture of f11. Seems to have done OK.  The problem with Flickr is that a following has to be built around a particular genre of photographs. People interested in long exposure shots turn out to be massively uninterested in street photography. To get unique audiences I had to set up several Flickr sites around each genre, which just turned out to be a pain in the backside to administer and to keep active. 

I also briefly turned to Instagram, which posed its own challenges and opportunities. I did create (I think) a nearly perfect instagram account with 16 very carefully selected photographs, and 5000 followers at its peak. but again it was too much work and combined with Flickr it was more than I was really willing to undertake. And the least said about Facebook the better. Suffice to say I’ve retired disillusioned and very irritated from that entire world.

So finally I’ve come full circle and returned to a dedicated portfolio website for my photographs. Getting around to this after all this time has enabled me to be more selective about the images I’ve chosen and the categories I have put them in. It also enables me to be much more efficient about uploading and maintaining the content. The portfolio will expand over time and I may move photographs around and remove some entirely. 

I built this site on top of one that I had previously created for articles about photographic technology. Those articles still remain, and I think are still of interest. I’ll be adding to that set of information as a side element of the blog over time.  

I hope you like the user experience of the site as well as the images I present here. My goal has been to create a design that is very clean, provides the maximum space for images,  and which works as well on tablets and phones as it does on PCs.  It’s taken quite a while to get to A layout that I think works well for my images. The site uses some of the latest technology and plugins for the web.  If you want to learn more about how it has been built have a look at my web design info pagedavid@mcaughtry.photo