About my gear
A passion for Art and photography
This page of the Antimuseum is dedicated to my gear. I grew a passion for Art ever since childhood and I have been doing watercolour painting and drawing since the early 1980s.
I have 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.
Digital photography and gear
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.
Later, I pawned 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. 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.
At the end of 2019, right before the whole pandemic shebang struck the world, I went mirrorless and purchased a Nikon Z7 mirrorless camera. Even though I have this newer mirrorless camera, my D810 remains my favourite camera to this day and I use both depending on the circumstances.
Lenses
I love my cameras but I love my lenses even better. I have a whole collection of glass. One of my favourites is a manual vintage fixed focal 35mm f:2 Nikkor O lens, which was produced the year I was born.
More about photography gear in general
I know and like my gear pretty much. I take great care in maintaining it and keeping it clean. however, I’m not obsessed with technology and I’ve been working long enough in the innovation and technology field to be able to state that the kind of gear you are using doesn’t matter too much. Just like I can draw with any kind of pencils and coloured pencils, whatever the brand and however old they may be, photography can be done with any kind of camera, even pin-hole cameras. It doesn’t matter at all. My photography work is based on how I see the world and my photos are pretty much composed in the same way that I build my watercolours and drawings. Maybe I’m not a photographer at all, more of a painter with a camera in his hands. And I’m pretty happy like this as it is.
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