Hello to anyone who's interested enough to look at my photos and then also read about me and what I have to add.

To me photography is MUSIC TO MY EYES

It allows me to retain & express what I see and feel. It feels better than therapy (I imagine) but not as good as the good relationships with people and places I love.

More of my photos can be found on other streams, including Musique-Cordiale and JB photographer 2 : www.flickr.com/photos/jbphotographer2/

Except for a few photos (mainly OF ME, taken on my camera and marked as such), almost all the photos here were TAKEN BY ME. There is nothing stolen from others or sucked from the web. I like Flickr streams that adopt the same approach.

NOTE: I tend to ignore people who are just nosing around and want to look but have nothing worthwhile on their own photo-stream for others to see. We like to look at your interesting, clever, beautiful and inviting pictures too. So if it's all going to be one-sided (or if what you have is not stuff I'm likely to want to see - judge from what's here), please don't bother asking me to be a contact or a friend. But if you share my interests or think I'll share yours, please go ahead. (To me, "family" means just that). Thanks!

I'm just an ordinary English bloke for whom my cameras have always been as important as my mobile phone: hence I have a big collection of photos accumulated over a lifetime. I know that there's much MORE TO LIFE THAN PHOTOGRAPHY. Images do not consume me as people do. But photography chronicles and, I think, improves my life and provides perspective. It sometimes reminds me of what - and who - is important and, too often, illustrates my mistakes and misguided priorities.

I have not uploaded many of the zillions of photos I took before the digital era (and hope some fast technology will make that easy one day). Meanwhile my photostream here includes a record mainly of my recent life, loves and leanings, including pictures of people and some of the places that mean most to me, of late.

ALL ARE RIGHTS RESERVED but. If you would like to use any of my photos, please ask for permission by email/Flickr-mail: I'll probably be only too happy but please ask first!

Most of my photos on Flickr are public and available for all to see.Though only a few people will care to see more than a few of my assembly of personal photos, I hope some of them have wider interest because of something informative, historical, attractive, beautiful, special or desirable about what I've captured.

I'm not ashamed of any pictures I have on Flickr. Inevitably a few feature people doing things they might not want everyone to witness (though they would not be there if I did not think they were beautiful or interesting. I try, anyway, not to show pictures of people I care about doing unappealing things. So EVEN MY INTIMATE PICS or some of the more revealing or beautiful photos that people click on often,

...... possibly driven by a hunt for something erotic, ARE NOT PORN. I think they are elegant or intriguing or just portray stunning-looking people. Not everyone looks wonderful naked, for example, but I hope that my portrayals show them looking sexy, attractive, loved and desirable. And some are just fun, funny or simply wicked and wonderful - to me: They are my attempts at works of ART and/or they express something I feel or maybe they tell a story as only a picture can - though sometimes with a few added words from me. So they may be on display usually if their subjects are content with that... but, for now & in some cases, only to people who have PERMISSION - whom I've LISTED or invited as "FRIENDS". If you want to see those pictures, you need to join that list as a "contact" and a "friend." Feel free to seek an invitation! (Equally, your invitations to add my photos to groups are often welcome but please invite me to join the group at the same time, especially if it's otherwise private!).

The rest are available for anyone to see and judge. There are lots of portraits of people, places from travels or work, shots of locations that matter to me or which I frequent and of places I've visited only briefly. I hope they all catch something of the soul of what's in shot.

Enjoy, feed back and comment, encourage me and join my contact list if you feel like it (but see note above re blocking).

Thanks for reading this long spiel. I know I'm just like millions of other Flickr obsessives, even if some of you have a better eye than I do, or are real pros.... or just started with a new point-and-shoot digital and an appreciation of what the world has to show for itself, if captured in a little cross-sectional moment, on camera.

I'd also like to see your photos if they are clever, interesting or beautiful. But if your stream has nothing visible, if you have no icon or if your stream is all male body parts, forget it: I'll get round to deleting you when I notice, OK?

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What follows is MY HISTORY AS A PHOTOGRAPHER. Sorry if it's a bit convoluted but camerados might just find what's happened (mainly technically) in the past 40 years or so interesting: oldies (not that I quite think of myself as such) will remember all this stuff anyway.

An amateur photographer since age 6 (in the mid 1950s), initially with a Kodak box camera, though I followed in a family obsession: my mum took thousands of excellent shots on her 1945 Balda Jubilette folding camera with its German Schneider-Kreuznach f/2.9 lens, soon used in combination with a 1948 GE light meter.

and her mother recorded travels to America and India on her American Eastman Kodak 1910 folding camera with indisputably "full-frame" films on wooden spools.

Bought my first yellow cloud filter for a Kodak 127 camera at age 9 and have been playing with images ever since. Graduated to SLR with a Topcon RE and a 50mm f/1.8 lens around 1972. Great camera that incorporated a light and distance meter so that you could take pictures automatically: just set the aperture or speed and focus: Lovely resolution in those shots after all these years:

But Topcon had a limited range of lenses and soon afterwards became Hanimex and moved out of the camera business. So on to a Canon AE1 and that superb 50mm f/1.4 lens plus initially a 28mm lens in 1978 in time for the birth of my first child. Someone stole that camera but not the FD lenses in 1986, allowing me to get a Canon T70 (but too early for a T90) in 1986 in time for a trip to Papua New Guinea.

It worked with the lenses I had for the AE1, by then including a fab 135mm f/2 Canon prime and a Miranda 70-210 zoom. The world of travel, people, life, interest, beauty- and visual seduction - was mine. Still have all that kit and used it a lot in Europe and America till the mid 90s....

But, by then, Canon had developed its EOS auto-focus system. Though focusing with the split prism on the T70 never seemed too hard for me when my eyes were young, I did eventually get a second-hand EOS-1 and started the expensive process of replicating my FD lenses with EF ones from Canon and Sigma.

Then a daughter went to Zanzibar on a gap year. She did not want to be embarrassed in front of poor people with whom she worked by the arrival of her dad with lots of ostentatious expensive-looking (also intrusive in a Moslem community) equipment. So I bought a new Canon Ixux with "advanced film cassette", used it extensively and kept it hidden away in my pocket.. A very useful new string to my bow!

And then came digital...l. The first one, still from Canon around 2000, cost far too much and was very disappointing: few megapixels, ghastly colour saturation etc. at a time when there were few post-processing options. Gave it away and stuck exclusively with 35mm film for awhile longer.

Until... in 2003 along came the Ixus II digital, bought duty free en route to India .... and then, for me in 2005, the brilliant Canon 20D, which matched the Canon (but notably NOT the Sigma "Canon-fit") lenses I'd begun to accumulate for my EOS cameras (by then I'd added a lightweight EOS 500N to my loved tank of an EOS-1, introducing several new tech advances over my otherwise top-of-the-line 35mm system).

Well, of course, the Ixus II , also now sold on eBay and replaced by a 7.1 Megapixel Canon Powershot SD550 (like Ixus but American), plus the arrival of serious editing software, won me over to digital. Films began to lie dormant in the fridge. I rarely use the EOS 35mm film cameras or lug them around with me now. I have played with the T70 and its lenses a few times (took ages to find an affordable 135mm f/2 EF lens to match my FD one though the numbers meant different focal lengths, in effect, on my crop-sensor 20D; eventually had to have it though ). And that 20D was, and remains, a GREAT CAMERA: too good to sell at silly low eBay prices, somehow!? (Though later I did!)

Supplemented it with a Sigma 10-20mm (fantastic though weird/interesting with buildings and off-centre people) and a great Sigma 100-300mm f/4 zoom (even) after all the earlier Sigma stuff failed to work except wide open with newer Canon digitals (Grrrrh!). And a 1.4 extender. But it, and the Canon 40D I've just got excited about since autumn 2007, work brilliantly with the Sigma 30mm f/1.4 and my old but lovely Canon primes: 24mm f2.8, 50mm f/1.4 and 85mm f/1.8 . And at 10+ megapixels on the 40D, even with the 1.6 crop, I'm happy, again/at last (except that, since writing this, my new Canon 7D had made me even happier), with my kit and its capabilities (as I thought I was in 1986 with my T70 and FD lenses, of course). Ebay has allowed me to refine and delete some of the mistaken purchases and to compensate for Sigma's failures at reverse-engineering their earlier EOS lenses to keep up with clever-Canon's wiles. And, except for parties, I still rarely use even off-camera flash: those available-light prime lenses are great for the concerts, gigs and most of the subtle/intimate people-shots I do indoors. My big fave is the 85mm f/1.2 L: only have the slow-to-focus equally-huge-glass Mk I version (cos the Mk II is even more seriously expensive and the older version is fine for slower-moving classical musicians who mostly need to keep their legs still & need to read their scores, at least. It's far too heavy to lug around and has too shallow a DoF whenever the light is brighter and the f/1.8 lens is more than good enough - but amazing for people-pics at concerts). oh... and now my 7d's HD video capabilities are tempting me into a new pursuit!

So now the mistakes are all mine: composition, being there with the right lens at the right moment, charming people into collaborating with my photo-shooting designs (and all that time....)..... all that stuff is my accumulated skill (or often not). But that's what still excites me about all this. And I'm still (mostly) just an amateur.

Flickr, of course, holds only a fraction of my photo-history. It gets more of my digital output but converting all those acres of slide and print output into digital images is mostly too tedious to contemplate. I have converted (still inadequately) a little of it. Inevitably my Flickr photo-stream is disproportionately recent, though. So is even what's carefully backed up on several hard disks. It reflects recent places, loves and pursuits rather than featuring many of the images of people, places or enthusiasms of even a decade ago. A shame because some of those were memorable and/or beautiful and I expended huge amounts of effort and imagination (not to mention cajoling and lugging) on what went before.

Thanks for looking!

PS Not always but....

"If your pictures aren't good enough, you aren't close enough"

- Robert Capa

Droit à l'image (Articles 226-1 à 226-8 du Code civil): Certaines personnes peuvent être identifiables sur une des photos. Si vous êtes une de ces personnes et que vous ne souhaitez pas la publication de votre image, merci de m'adresser un courriel, et la photo sera retirée.

Current kit includes: Canon 7D & 40D

Manfrotto 55 tripod with 2 heads

Canon 430 EX flash

walk-around lens: Canon 17-55mm f/2.8

wide angle zoom: Sigma 10-22mm

long zoom: Sigma 100-300mm f/4

Sigma 30mm f/1.4

Canon 50mm f/1.4

Canon 85mm f/1.2

Canon 135mm f/2

Canon 1.4 extender II

wireless remote trigger

directional off-camera stereo mike

& several 8 and 16GB CF cards so that no video or RAW shoot is impossible (if only I can handle it!)