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Jack Gentle LRPS

I became interested in photography some 55 years ago with a 3 ½ by 2 ½ plate camera which I bought for £15. I made an enlarger with the light source housed in a dried milk tin and put a dummy plate holder on the bottom onto which I fitted the camera.

Although I made some small progress from there over the years but I never really liked darkroom work. I started taking more serious snaps four years ago when we walked the Inca Trail. It seemed a pity to travel all that way and expend all that energy without taking a decent camera so I bought an Nikon F80. Two of the images which I took on that trip were included in my LRPS submission.

In spite of my persistence I never seemed to get the quality I wanted from scanned film. The quality from a modest digital camera was always better than anything I could scan in spite of investing in a Nikon dedicated film scanner.

My transition to complete digital came when we did a cycling trip in Tasmania. The F80 was too heavy to take on a bike so I used a Canon 3.2 mega pixel digital compact. The photograph entitled Apocalypse in my LRPS panel was taken on Maria Island during that trip.

The little Canon has now been passed on to my wife and I have upgraded to the Nikon D70 SLR. I will need to produce some very much better work before I need to upgrade from that - if ever.

Preparing the LRPS panel was an interesting exercise and it is almost as much about how the panel is laid out as the images themselves. This is not to say that the images are not important. At the adjudication in Bath there was one rejected submission which looked stunning from where I was sitting but the five judges dismissed it on the grounds of poor print quality.

So where from here? I would like to go for the ARPS but realise that I will have to specialise very much more before I can attempt a submission My current interest is in creative photography. (See a copy of the RPS Creative Eye if you want a definition!) While I have great admiration for what others in the RPS Creative Group achieve I still don’t get anything which really comes near.

The main thing is that I enjoy what I am doing and hope that if I go on doing it with application I will, one day, find some success!

Jack's cameras

Nikon F80

Nikon D70

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