Photography has been a long standing passion of mine since a very young age when I was given an Ilford Sportsman, and as they say, the rest is history. I soon progressed to medium format with a Kodak twin lens model which I have since forgotten the model. However, that was the start of me becoming a professional photographer, a long and tortuous route that I initially did not set out to embark on, I had a very different career plan mapped out in my mind.
Working professionally, I have been fortunate over the years to use many cameras which are now coveted by collectors and enthusiast users alike. With the advent of a digital workflow I started to miss the old ways of creating a photograph along with the idiosyncrasies of the equipment needed to create them.
I began to miss the feel of a camera crafted from metal rather than plastic, the aesthetic look of chrome and black leather, the finely damped, silky smooth and silent focussing of a precision engineered manual lens. These virtues and many more add to the immense pleasure I get from creating a photograph using film and a camera from the true vintage period of film photography. There is only only one greater photographic nirvana I get, and that’s from using antique wood and brass in the form of my Gandolfi.
This site will always be a work in progress, as is my journey in photography and no doubt it will be slow progress, I still have a day job to do. There are many cameras of which I wish to share my enthusiasm for, some are well known, others are hardly known at all or perhaps have long since been forgotten or overlooked. Hopefully this site will go some way to highlight these treasures.
DSH Photographic 