About Me

At some point in the early to mid-1970s, my parents gave me a Kodak Pocket Instamatic and took me up to London as a birthday treat. I think my first photograph was of a soldier sitting on his horse at Horse Guards Parade in Whitehall. During school holidays, I took my camera with me nearly everywhere I went and was deeply resentful when I had to leave it at home at the beginning of each new term. I think the last time I used it was at The Glastonbury Festival in 1984.

I started my career in commercial property later that year and, as soon as I could afford it, bought myself a Pentax P39. Again, I took that camera with me almost everywhere I went but never managed to stray far from its fully automatic settings. I have boxes and boxes of negatives and prints and they’re all pretty dreadful with a wide, wide gulf between what I saw and what I was capable of reproducing. Juggling two small children, pushchairs, nappy sacks and teddy bears put paid to that and my interest in photography slipped beneath the sticky, gloopy waves of parenthood.

By the time the children were old enough to appear in public without a parental hand to hold, my darling Pentax was pretty much obsolete and my obsessive interest in photography was long dormant. Roll the clock forward and my 50^th birthday in 2014 saw me clutching a brand new Nikon D3200 with a shiny kit lens – I had finally entered the digital age. 

The past few years has passed in a photographic frenzy as this old dog has learned new tricks and, little by little, I am getting closer and closer to producing digitally the images I can see floating around in my head. I am completely devoted to my Nikon D750 and now spend all my pocket money on lenses and photographic paraphernalia – and, yes, I still take my camera pretty much everywhere I go.

Charles Woollam uses a Nikon D750 camera with Nikkor lenses and occasional Lee filters.