All About Me!

My name is Chris Carrington, and I live in Derby.

Back in 1976 my parents were celebrating their 25th (Silver) wedding anniversary. Wanting some photographs of the event my Dad handed me his Fujica Compact 35mm camera and said "go take some pictures". 

When the pictures came back from the Chemist my parents were thrilled and I was thrilled with their reaction. Even at the early age of 16 I realised how powerful a captured image could be.

I used Dad's Fujica until I started work at Rolls-Royce later that year when, on the princely sum of £17.10 per week, I could afford to buy my first SLR camera. As with most beginners in that era I bought a Zenith E (Russian Clunker) and began to teach myself photography.

I bought a book from Clulows in Derby and read it cover-to-cover. The book explained all about exposure, aperture, shutter speed, ISO (or ASA as it was then). 

I noticed that my pictures began to look better as I learned more and more. The next thing was to learn how to develop and print my own pictures.  I set my bedroom up as a darkroom and, with another book, started to learn the finer art of producing photographs. I still believe there's nothing as magical as taking a blank piece of paper, exposing it then dropping into a bath of developer and watching an image appear. 

I started with Black and White and eventually moved into colour with a Durst enlarger and Patterson tanks and chemicals.

I started to upgrade my camera gear. Initially I moved to an Olympus OM-10 with a a manual adapter, then an Olympus OM-1 and finally The wonderful Olympus OM-2n. 

In the mid 80's I drifted away from photography for a while, sold my gear, got married, bought a house, had kids, you know the story. When the kids were born I picked up a little Canon Sureshot so that i could capture them growing up and I have a massive library of pictures of the pair of them.

In the mid 90's I began to drift back towards photography and purchased my first digital camera, an Olympus D10 Brio. 2.0 mp (massive, or at least it was then). It was a great snappy but I soon wanted more control over the images. 

What I needed was a D-SLR and as I no longer needed a darkroom with smelly chemicals I needed to look for a way of developing my images as I would have done with a darkroom. Enter the Nikon D40x and Adobe Photoshop.

I subscribed to Digital Photo magazine and began to learn Photoshop using tips and techniques from the likes of Kingsly Singleton, Jon Adams and Gavin Hoey

The D40x was a wonderful camera but I wanted to use the Nikon Creative Lighting System so I sold the D40x and bought a Nikon D80 followed eventually the magnificent Nikon D300s. I've since moved up to a full frame camera in the fabulous Nikon D800.

I continue to try to develop my skills in both Photoshop and Photography.