I probably got my first camera when I was about ten.

 

In my late teens I know I had by then graduated to a Praktica and mostly shot 35mm Agfa slide film.

 

By my mid to late 20’s I’d moved on again and become a Nikon devotee.

 

I’ve owned several over the years, switching to digital DSLR around 2007. I had in the meantime been using compact digital both at home and at work (we still own two Nikon coolpix and a Canon Powershot S50)

 

So for many years I was no more than a keen amateur photographer. I didn’t consider myself in any way artistic. I merely took holiday snaps with which bore my family and friends.

 

My chosen career as a Chartered Surveyor, Engineering Draftsman and Cartographer seemed to bear out this lack of artistic endeavour.

 

However, I had long had a developing interest in graphic art and design – admiring the work of such diverse people as Charles Rennie Mackintosh, Damian Hirst and the much less we’ll known Harry Beck (He devised and for many years revised the various iterations of the London Underground Map)

 

It would be equally remiss of me to not mention other notable personal hero’s such as Frank Lloyd Wright, Edwin Lutyens, CFA Voysey, David Hockney, and “the boys in the band” the entire Bauhaus movement ... Gropius, de Rohe etc etc.

 

Through my work, later in my career, I became involved in Large Format Digital Scanning for the preservation of old coal mining maps and plans.

 

Through this we spun off and were encouraged to undertake commercial scanning work of further unique maps, plans and engineering & architectural design drawings – working on a diverse range of notable historic pieces including the work of Isambard Kingdom Brunel, Frank Lloyd Wright & Capt. James Cook along with a lot that were far more mundane but no less interesting in their own way.

 

Much of this work involved digital stitching of separate images to recreate the whole and it was this that led directly to my work creating Large Field Panoramas.

 

Influences such as Beck and Hirst steered me towards redacting both single shot and panoramas in an attempt to recreate the style of the travel posters so typical of the Art Deco era, one of my favourite periods.

 

I suppose it was inevitable, given my career background and interest in map making and cartography that I would finally land on the typographic map style that again began to take up so much of my spare time.

 

Whilst I have never really sought to develop my interest commercially, I have been fortunate enough, very occasionally to have had people actually ask to buy a piece of my work, and that is fantastic!

 

If you happen to find yourself in that category and are interested then please get in touch via my eMail at simoncaunt@btinternet.com

 

Comments/ feedback on any of my images will always be useful , excepting if it's truly awful, when I think I'd prefer it if you just didn't bother.

 

Current equipment

 

Cameras

 

Nikon D800

Nikon D90

Panasonic LUMIX TZ8

iPhone XS. ***

iPhone 7plus. ***

 

(Mrs C’s Panasonic LUMIX TZ100)

 

*** I make no apologies for listing my iPhones, there are times when it is not appropriate to lug around a DSLR. And even when it is I still use them us well. Their geo-location capabilities come in very handy on Flickr.

 

Lenses

 

AFS Nikkor 24.0 - 70.0mm f/2.8

AFS Nikkor 80.0 - 400.0mm f/4.5 - 5.6

 

Nikon DX AF-S 18.0 - 135.0mm f/3.5 - 5.6

 

Tripods

 

Manfrotto MT055 CXPRO4

Manfrotto MTPIXIEVO-BK PIXI EVO 2-Section Mini Tripod

 

Heads

 

XPRO 3 way with retractable levers

XPRO Ball head (Magnesium) 200PL PRO plate

Bespoke adapted accessory arm from old Manfrotto tripod

 

All images are copyright ©️protected.

 

All Rights Reserved.

 

Copying, altering, displaying or redistribution of any of these images without written permission from the artist is strictly prohibited.

 

If you are interested and wish to purchase any of my work in any form including, but not limited to, for publication or commercial use, please contact me by email at simoncaunt@btinternet.com