Author: DMcA

I can’t bring myself to take Street photographs of the fresh-faced and clueless tourists or office workers that comprise 90% of the people you see in London. But on numerous successive visits to the Far East I started to realise that the experience etched on the faces of particularly the women told quite a profound story. I’ve experimented with all sorts of different perspectives to try and get the flavour of this which is all about the eyes and the face. In the end I hit upon the Olympus 75mm f-18 lens which is the equivalent of a full-frame frame 150mm focal length. This enables me to focus in on the face whilst blurring out the background and other extraneous features. There are a whole lifetimes described in those eyes.
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The lady crab catchers of Kep on the Cambodian south coast. These stylish and tough women walk out in colourful head-to-toe outfits to bring in the crab baskets and supply the fishing boats.
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Shot in and around Cape Town. Many of the images were shot the day after Nelson Mandela died, and showed the emotional hold he had on the population. I don’t think anyone there had any idea how bad it was all going to get afterwards.
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My street photography hero is the late, great, Tony Ray-Jones, the inspriation behind Martin Parr and almost all the other observers of the British by the sea. I don’t spend much time at the seaside, but these have been my observations. South Africa it happens is quite close to how a british beach may have been in the ’50s, so it’s quite a fruitful hunting ground if you like that kind of thing.
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Taken in Myanmar, Vietnam and Cambodia, before I discovered the wonder of the 75mm lens.
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We are fortunate to live in a private 10 acre Japanese water garden of great antiquity. It’s a huge privilege to have somewhere as tranquil and beautiful in front of us but it has turned out to be quite difficult to photograph. This is largely because there is so much stuff there that photographs tend to be just full of detail and are often compositionally disappointing. After 10 years of trying I think I have started to get the hang of it which is to employ the time-honored method of leaving as much out of the image as possible. Almost all of these images are taken handheld with my Olympus E-_M1 Mark II. I have made prints of many of them at 3-ft by 2-ft dimensions and they look really good, which further cements my view that this camera is the best one I’ve ever owned.
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Shot in France and Cape Town.
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One of my absolute favourite birds, the Sacred Ibis is graceful and elegant, with huge white translucent wings. I am fortunate that they nest in quite large quantities near our house in Cape Town, so I dash on over there whenever I have a free moment. although they are big they are not slow and they are probably the most frustrating bird I’ve ever tried to photograph. You absolutely cannot get closer than about 30 to 50 m from them before they fly away again. So you need a very long lens and a great deal of patience. I have purchased the first and I am working on the second.
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Taken from the Big Tower – a custom hide at the wonderful Gigrin farm Red Kite sanctuary in central Wales. This was a comparison test shoot between the Nikon D850, the Olympus E-M1ii, and the Sony AR7iv. The Sony didn’t generate a single usable shot due to excessive noise and poor focus. These shots were taken with the E-M1ii, and I think stand up remarkably well to those taken with the much bigger heavier and more expensive Nikon D850.
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Taken from the Big Tower – a custom hide at the wonderful Gigrin farm Red Kite sanctuary in central Wales. This was a comparison test shoot between the Nikon D850, the Olympus E-M1ii, and the Sony AR7iv. The Sony didn’t generate a single usable shot due to excessive noise and poor focus. These shots were taken with the D850 which probably is still the best wildlife camera I own.
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puffins are possibly my favourite bird. They are incredibly tough and have very un-birdlike like behaviour in some ways – for example their nests are actually earth burrows in the cliff-edge, exactly like rabbits. They are also fantastically fast and difficult to photograph, which is why they are not flying in many of the puffin photos that you often see. One minute there’s a puffin and the next minute there’s no puffin, or vice versa. I’ve been three times to Bempton Cliffs to get Puffin photographs and they were only visible on one of those trips. But on other days, usually when I’m not there there are hundreds of little buggers.
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The Willows is a garden centre near Sevenoaks in Kent which has a small but rather attractive wildlife and falconry Centre. Their owl collection is particularly good and they have some great and enthusiastic owl handlers. it’s a favourite spot of mine to test out new cameras and on this occasion I was trying out some new Olympus lenses.
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