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Update 2026

I suffered a stroke in 2016. I'm alive and all that, but it was certainly life-changing. Carrying an SLR is now too cumbersone, operating it too fiddly, getting to some of the locations I shot would be impossible. Not to mention my eyesight is now so bad, I'd have no idea what I was shooting!

Photography was once a big part of my life, but we go through phases. There are other things now.

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2013ish:

To celebrate my daughter's birth in 1999 I bought a camcorder which was able to take stills - and I was officially "digital". This album charts the growth of our family from this point on: the holidays, the events, the memories....even the cats have their place!

I'm based in the UK, just outside the New Forest (south coast-ish, 150km SW of London) in a village called Downton. Most of my images are local, from the Wilts/Hants/Dorset area. I used to love going across to mainland Europe, so there are a fair few images from there also, especially the northern (easily reachable) areas of France. But my camera generally travelled with me, so wherever I lay my hat...

My main camera is a (n old 12MP) Nikon D200, a brilliant piece of kit which is far more responsible for decent shots than I am. My general purpose lens is a Nikkor 18-200mm DX (superb), also have a Tamron 200-500mm zoom and a Nikkor 10.5mm fisheye. As phone cameras have evolved I have included more pictures from my phones - I have a liking for Sony devices - but although they are undoubtedly convenient I find they offer very limited ability to push boundaries.

Most everything here has been Geotagged - on the D200 I have a nifty gizmo by Solmeta (Flickr gets very stressed when I attempt to href to them, but they are still going and can easily be Googled) which tags images as I capture them. For other shots, and to generally mess around with EXIF data, I use an excellent freeware program called Geosetter.

In the early days I just published what I shot, but in 2006 I started to make an effort at post-processing things, so hopefully it is possible to see some improvement over time. For years I used a brilliant tool called Bibble - it must have been half decent because they were bought out by Corel and the product is sold as AfterShot Pro. I also dabbled a little with HDR photography, and used Photomatix, although I note that many graphics packages will now offer this feature.

Peter Hurford