Okay, so here’s a camera that I can practically guarantee you won’t have seen before. It is a panoramic camera that takes pictures 24x98mm on standard 35mm film. It started life as a Wray Stereographic camera and was converted into a panoramic camera some time in the 1960s. The conversion was carried out by a man called C. Leslie Thomson who wrote a book back in the 1950s on how to build your own stereo cameras. He turned the...

Here’s an unusual camera that I acquired about a year ago. It’s called a Mamiya Magazine 35.

Outwardly it looks like, and works similar to, a perfectly conventional 35mm rangefinder camera. Things change, however, when it comes to loading the film. Instead of loading it into the camera body in the conventional way, it loads into a separate magazine that can be separated from the main part of the body by pressing a button on the...

Allow me to present to you the wonderfully mysterious Mistley Towers. They can be found in the village of Mistley in Essex, where they stand, overlooking the River Stour, just inside the entrance to a small cemetery, seemingly for no reason whatsoever. Built in the neoclassical style, they look more like tall, slender pavilions, decorated with ionic columns and cornices, each topped by a cupola.

The towers are part of a series...

I’m a great admirer of Samuel Johnson, poet, essayist, writer and much more, who was quoted as saying: “No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money.” I suspect that if there had been cameras around in the 18th Century, he might equally have said: “No man but a blockhead ever took pictures except for money.”

My sentiments exactly. If I write and illustrate an article I get very edgy, not to say cross, if it fails to sell,...

The Ingenious Victorians: Weird and Wonderful Ideas from the Age of Innovation. That’s the title of my new book, due to be published next month.

Queen Victoria acceded to the throne on 20th June 1837 at the age of eighteen, and there she remained for a record-breaking reign that lasted a little under 64 years, a record which was beaten only recently by Queen Elizabeth II. The Victorian age was one of ingenuity, inventiveness a...

I'm a great believer in not having a trumpet unless you are prepared to blow it. So let me just announce that my new book 50 Landmark Cameras That Changed Photography is now available in the UK and the US. See my books pages for places to buy. Meanwhile, rather than go on about it too much myself, here's a review, written by my guest blogger today, Timothy Campbell. This review will appear in the next edition of Photographica...

Freelance photography isn’t the carefree business that some think. Take the pictures I shot some time ago for an illustrated article on Dungeness in Kent. I got the commission three months before the deadline. Plenty of time, then, to visit the area, gather information and spend a leisurely day taking pictures.

There then followed two months of awful weather. With time running out, and no intention of taking pictures in dull a...

As a camera collector, I love vintage equipment, the different types of camera, the way they work, their individual eccentricities. But for my day-to-day photographic work, I went digital years ago – and if my recent experiences are anything to go by, that’s the way it’s going to stay.

A few weeks ago I acquired a Zenith 80. It’s a copy of one of the first Hasselblads and, for a collector, it’s great. You can sit there winding...

 Strange how things interconnect in this business. Some time ago I discovered diaries and pictures put together by my father when he was a soldier in Africa during the Second World War. They told a fascinating story of his life at that time, and I saw the potential for illustrated articles, maybe even a book.

Military history magazines I approached failed to show interest, so I tried Best of British, which uses articles about...

Some while ago, I sold this picture to a greetings card company. As you can see, it shows waves crashing onto a rugged beach with a seagull cresting the spray bang on the pictorial third of the image. The beach was taken at one Dorset location, the waves at another a few miles away and the seagull started life on an old colour slide taken in Essex. It all came together courtesy of Photoshop.

Likewise, last month, a travel maga...