Alan Reed's page

A 40 year love affair with photography began when aged 10, I bought a camera with my pocket money.

A few years later I somehow got my hands on an ancient bellows Agfa camera which taught me the benefits of a quality lens.

I swopped that camera for an SLR: a Russian Zenit B, but often wished I'd kept it.

At Crewe College of Education 1973-6 whilst studying teaching, I spent many hours in the darkroom learning to develop and print my work. Here I invested in a Pentax Spotmatic 1000, which I used for the next 25 years.

I was encouraged when I had a photograph printed on the front cover of Practical Photography Magazine as part of an exhibition “The best of Amateur Photography” exhibited in the Pentax Gallery, London.

I have spent 30 years teaching; at Heartsease High School and currently at Lakenham Primary School in Norwich, where I have documented school life in both still images and video and have run photography workshops with schoolchildren.

Going digital in 2003 got my creative juices flowing again and visits to Finland, Russia, Spain and Estonia as well as Norfolk have resulted in much of my current work. My first digital camera was a Sony DSC-V1 compact, I then progressed to the bigger DSC-V3 and eschewing DSLR's am now working with a Sony R1 - ["This is the first all-in-one digital camera to utilize a large (APS size) sensor, to be precise a 10.3 megapixel CMOS unit measuring 21.5 x 14.4 mm which is essentially a slightly smaller version of the sensor used in the Nikon D2X. It's also the first APS size sensor to provide full time live preview to the camera's LCD monitor or EVF (electronic viewfinder). This means that there's no mirror box or prism making the camera more compact and allowing the lens to be positioned much closer to the sensor. Equally as important and interesting is the lens which provides a 24 - 120 mm (equivalent) five times zoom with a maximum aperture of F2.8 - F4.8"]

There don't seem to be many people using them though!

Until a few months ago I considered myself a purist in that I used no filters or special effects and no digital manipulation of my printed work. I recently got hold of Photoshop Elements and I can no longer claim that, but I do maintain that far too many photographs are nowadays over-manipulated and personally do as little as possible to my work.

I print on a variety of surfaces including cartridge and watercolour paper.

Over the last 40 years my continuing interests have included landscape, travel, architecture and flowers.