My name is Yann, I am a Breton (i.e. a Celt), and I was born and I live in Paris, France, after spending quite some time in England and roaming the world for business. I grew a passion for Art ever since childhood and I have been practising watercolour painting and drawing since the early 1980s.
I have also practised photography since the early 1980s, beginning with a Foca Sport II (an old 1960s French-made camera with a beautiful Angenieux fixed lens). I then practised on a more advanced Canon AE1 Program (from 1981 onwards), and I learned the Art of development in the dark room all by myself, focusing on black & white.
In 1996, I discovered digital photography – being an Internet pioneer – with one of Canon‘s first digital cameras brought by one of my Unisys colleagues direct from Japan: Canon’s Powershot 600.
It was using bespoke proprietary tiny floppy disks. The quality was terrific considering the date, and it took digital cameras a long time to catch up with those ancient wonders (half a million pixels overall, but the quality was excellent; maybe the built-in lens did it).
I then purchased a Kodak and wasn’t impressed with it, and I went on to use quite a few bridge format cameras from Olympus and a pocket Fuji camera until I purchased a decent DSLR camera by Sony (née Minolta) in 2007. I then decided to pawn my Sony Alpha 100 in 2011 for the amazing Nikon D7000, a mid-level SLR camera which provides really good shots for a very decent price.
In December 2012, I exchanged my Nikon D7000 for a brand new Nikon D600, a full-frame SLR camera very similar to the D7000 and more affordable than the top-end Nikon D800.
A few years later I bought the D810, a 36 MP beast. It’s a great camera, almost a medium format full frame job. Its precision and quality are absolutely amazing as in this shot of a sunflower taken last summer in the Ariège.
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