West from Cul Mor, Assynt
I’ve loved taking photographs ever since buying my first camera, (a little Ilford instamatic) through a special offer on the back of a cereal box, back in 1969. It wasn’t the finest of cameras but at the age of ten it seemed pretty good to me. I bought it just before we went on holiday to Eire and I came back with 12 (albeit rather fuzzy) photos of the Dingle peninsular. What is more, they were the only photographs of the holiday ….my father had failed to load his 35 mm film properly and came back to find an unexposed roll of film in his camera!
That little camera certainly got me into snapping photos whenever we went anywhere and before long I moved up market a little and got myself a very solid Zenith SLR. This camera was certainly not a sexy beast, (I think it was made out of plate steel) and I lugged it around along with a great little Weston light meter, for many years. By the time I was at Falmouth School of Art in the early 1980’s it was a bit of a joke to many of my friends who had spent much of their grants on new hi tech cameras. In the Easter break in 1981 a small group of us spent three weeks up on North Uist enjoying the wild beaches, the loch strewn land and the isolated hills of Beinn Mhor and Hecla. One of the group forgot to take a spare battery for his camera …and it ran out on the first week …no place to buy a replacement of course. Another friend, Paul, dropped his camera and being made out of plastic, the top cracked. And so it was yours truly (feeling rather smug) with my battered old iron clad manual Zenith who came away with the photos.
From Am Bodach, the Mamores
The Zenith, (now almost 35 years old,) still works although I put it into retirement at least ten years ago) and I’ve now moved into the digital age!! As my sight deteriorated I found I was taking more and more bad photographs. Using film and finding that 22 out of the roll of 24 were either tilting the sea out, had a thumb in the corner, or were simply just dreadful …well, it was getting expensive….hence my getting a digital camera. Now I can tilt the skyline as much as I want, take hundreds of dreadful pictures and get all five digits in front of the lens …and it doesn’t cost me anything …and if you snap enough you tend to get a couple of reasonable pictures most days.
On the edge of Rannoch Moor
Anyway, the reason for rambling on about photographs and cameras is that we’re holding a small Christmas Affordable Art Fair at the Harbour Arts Centre in Irvine on Sunday 5th December and Sunday 19th December. Around about a dozen of the artists and makers at the Courtyard Studios will be taking part with a wide range of paintings, drawings, prints, jewellery and cards on sale. I’ve decided to show a dozen photographs taken on the Scottish hills during the last 10 or so years. Most of them are my own but I’ve also included a couple that my partner Anita took….with her permission of course! It’ll be interesting to see what reaction I get with them.
The Cobbler
So, the event runs from 12 noon until 4 pm on 5th & 19th December. The Courtyard Studios are only two doors away from the Harbour Arts Centre on Harbour Street in Irvine. I’ll have my studio open as well so if you want to see some paintings too, then just drop by. There should be other studios open at the Courtyard too. I look forward to meeting anyone who can get along.
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