"I travel, therefore I am."

(Note. This photostream is for my oldest photos - for more recent photos, please click here...)

I got my first camera as a child, a lowly Kodak Instamatic 126-cartridge camera. It awakened my interest though, and by 17 I was the very proud owner of my first SLR, a Ricoh KR-10. That fuelled a passion shared with my close friends, and it was almost inevitable that I would end up as a keen traveller, backpacking around the World with rolls of film tucked safely in the deepest parts of my backpack. I made a very early choice to take only transparencies, and although I experimented with most films on the market through the 80's and 90's, I was a loyal Kodachrome user, although I later found Agfachrome to be as rich in colour, and a little more forgiving.

That KR-10 was eventually replaced due to damage by a 2nd-hand Ricoh XR-2s, and after that was stolen in a hostel in Australia, a Minolta X-700. By the late 90's I developed a desire to take prints as well as slides, and purchased a small Canon compact, particularly for skiing holidays where my SLR was just too heavy and bulky. So began a new dimension to my passion, and for a while I travelled with both SLR and compact, although eventually the compact took over due to its convenience and ever evolving lens technology. My trust SLR was effectively retired when I bought my first digital camera - a basic Canon Powershot - and become hooked overnight! I then upgraded to a digital 'super-zoom' - the Panasonic DMC-FZ28. Not quite a dSLR, but almost as good, and so much easier to carry around. I loved it, and had a lot of fun with the manual and B&W settings...

Sadly my FZ28 was lost when my bag was snatched in Barcelona in Nov 2012. That left me with the tiny camera on my Nokia C2-01 phone, which I have pushed to the absolute limit for 5 months, until, finally, purchasing a Nikon P510. I'm still finding out what it is capable of, but we can expect some interesting results over the coming months... :-)

My photographs that originated as slides/transparencies and negatives were scanned with a Nikon Coolscan III and digitally remastered (especially in the case of Kodachrome which doesn't scan correctly). Some prints were reproduced using an HP flat-bed scanner. Digital photographs are from Sep-07 onwards.

I generally do not edit or crop my photos - what you see is what I took. The only exceptions to that may be where the scanned image from a slide or negative required contrast & saturation adjustments to bring it as close as possible to the original. Some digital b&w may have had the contrast enhanced, but no more than would have been done in the darkroom. No special effects have been used, so all those spectacular sunsets were exactly that - spectacular!

I'm happy for my photos to be included or referenced in bona fide websites for non-commercial use, so long as they are linked back to the original, or include a link to my flickr home page (as www.flickr.com/photos/phil_p/), or are attributed to me (e.g. "© gothphil at flickr"). Please click on the 'cc' link against each photo for more information.

Thanks for taking an interest and enjoy my travels!

- Phillip 11-Dec-2018