A large part of the reason I set up this website is my huge collection of photographs from the 1970's through to the present day. For a lot of that time I never went anywhere without a camera. Sometimes it was an 110 Instamatic, sometimes a 35mm "point-and-shoot". If I was being serious it was an Olympus OM1 with a motor drive. Sometimes with a second OM1 si I could shoot colour and B&W at the same time.

I had my own darkroom for part of this time, and processed and printed 35mm B&W myself. The result is that I have literaly thousands of frames of Instamatic and 35mm negatives & slides, covering my time at the BBC, Molinare and as a freelance.

This site is a selection of my archive. Some of it is of historical interest, and if anyone remembers "being there", e-mail me at sadiq@editorsbench.co.uk. I have lost a lot of my notes, so there will be times when my memory fails me, and I look at a shot and have to say, "who are these people?".

Technical stuff.

Most of the images on these pages were scanned directly from the negatives or slides, using an ION Film2 PC. Prints were scanned mainly on a flat-bed, usually part of whatever All-in-One I had at the time.

To start with I used Adobe PhotoShop for post-processing, but since I move to the Linux OS I have used GIMP.

My camera's have ranged from a late 1960's Contax, through a couple of Pentax's, to Olympus OM's and an AF. During the Olympus period I had a comprehensive set of lenses of which my favourite was a Zeiss T2 35-85mm zoom, which was so good it became my standard lens. Sadly it and the OM2 body it was attached to were stolen.

Colour film stock has been mainly Kodak negative or slide, with a preponderance of ASA 800 or faster Ektachrome. I haven't owned a flash for a long time, as I prefer the look of the candid, available light shot.

Black & white stock was mainly Ilford HP4 or HP5, with some Kodak Tri-X and even the odd roll of Pan-F. Most of the B&W was hand processed in Ilford chemicals and printed using a Durst C35 enlarger. Contact prints were mainly on Ilford paper in the early days, and then later I changed to Kodak. Enlargments were mainly Ilford, and a lot of these on Multi-grade paper.

For a long time my point-and-shoot was a Minolta Autopak 430E 110 Instamatic which I still have. It has electric wind and a flash. It hasn't worked this century! Later I had an Olympus AF-1.

I no longer have any 35mm kit, as I changed to digital point and shoot in around 2000. Initially this was an Agfa CL18 digital camera, which lived in my cricket scorer's bag. I now use a Panasonic Lumix DMC-TZ5. A very nice camera, but I still haven't got used to not having an optical viewfinder!