John Longbottom

John trained as an Electronic Engineer and spent many years working in the Ministry of Defence in a variety of roles. He has been interested in photography since his early teens, when he bought his first serious camera, a Yashica Minister II, a 35mm film camera with a 50mm fixed lens. He later moved to a Pentax SLR 35mm camera, with a pair of zoom lenses and with which he took pictures on colour slides. Working in the MOD took him to some interesting places and this encouraged his interest in landscape photography in interesting parts of the world.

With the transition of photography to the digital format, Pentax were initially left behind by the new developments. John kept his film-based SLR, but also obtained a Pentax digital camera, but this was a very basic machine, capable of just 5MP. Pentax eventually started to catch up and introduced the K10 10MP DSLR, which John decided to buy because he was able still to use the lenses he'd acquired for his film-based SLR years before. The K10 was a great improvement on the previous Pentax digital cameras, though still perhaps not up to the rivals from Canon and Nikon

John made good use of the K10, adding additional lenses to his kit, before upgrading first to the K5, then to the K3. The K3 is a 24MP camera, with a pretty good performance, more or less equivalent to similarly priced products from Canon and Nikon. John has avoided to temptation to move to the newer Pentax K1, with its full sized sensor - he would have to replace a number of his lenses if he did go along that route and being strictly an amateur enthusiast, he doesn't think he could justify the expense! However, he now also has a Pentax KP, another 24MP camera, but with improved noise performance and with which he can still use all his lenses.

All DSLRs are pretty heavy, so John has also acquired a more compact camera, a Fuji X10. This camera is small enough to fit in a coat pocket, but has a 14MP sensor and a real viewfinder - a distinct asset in bright sunlight. If he were to be starting out today, he'd probably be looking at the new developments in mirrorless cameras, with Sony and Fuji having some very interesting products weighing a bit less than their DSLR counterparts. Again, though, as an amateur enthusiast, he doesn't think he could justify the expense!

The pictures on the site have been taken by one or other of the cameras mentioned above, so the resolution and noise performance varies, depending on the model used. Some of the images have been scanned from 35mm colour tranparencies - this is indicated when this is the case