Then and now

Then and now

I was thinking about the changes we’ve seen in the last twenty or thirty years as I went for an early walk this morning – mostly the photographic ones, but it’s often useful to consider one or two other things to help keep perspective. In the end, I decided on a 20-year view.

Back then, although I owned a couple of autofocus cameras, my workhorses were my Contax RTS and Pentax 67 – and those camera outfits are more or less unchanged since. No developments, but all still working.

I drove a Rover 825 D, which I’d bought half a decade earlier, after it had done three years as a cousin’s company car, and I’d taken the mileage from around 128k to over 180k. With the massive fuel tank and rising prices, it was the first car I ever spent £50 on refuelling… That would take me 600 miles, though.



I shot with models once every month or two, partly because I had a full-time job that kept me busy every weekday, and partly because I had two teenage children, sort of setting a benchmark for family expenditure – and, of course, it was going to rise for the next few years. My daughter was starting to look round universities.

Digital was the stuff of rather remote articles in the magazines, and the internet wasn’t a serious source of images or knowledge, as all of it was still dial-up for me. I hadn’t heard of Ephotozine.
That was the time when boxes of Ilford Multigrade could be got for £20 (100 sheets of 10”x8”), and film was not costly: many labs were providing a free replacement roll of colour negative stock with every develop and enprint order.

Since then, I’ve retired, gone mainly digital, and shoot more often – I’d done more studio sessions by lockdown this year than in the whole of 2000. And while I always carried my camera, I took fewer frames on most days than I do now (though that’s partly because my exercise is now round the block, rather than Coventry station to Christchurch House in the city centre!)

I’m definitely spending a higher proportion of my income on photography – but that’s as much to do with retirement as anything else. And more of my time: I definitely wasn’t writing a blog back then, although I’d written an opinion piece for an internal audit magazine about the benefits of writing reports in plain English.

My technical standards are higher now, and I know vastly more about cameras and photography. And I’m taking more pictures, of a wider range of subjects.



And, of course, finding models was a very different matter! Back then, the small ads in the back of Practical Photography were one source, and the model register at the few studios around the country were the other. Apart from that, it was a matter of asking people you knew, or your friends knew. OK if you were an art student, but not encouraging for most of us!

Some things don’t change, though – my basic choice remains a full-frame body with an 85mm lens on it… I wonder what has changed in your photographic life? (Assuming it goes back that far!)