“I was short, and I’ve sprouted…”

The Sunday Times used to ask celebrities what cars they’d owned and what their dream car would be. In my case, it would’ve been the same answer: an E-Type Jaguar! When it comes to cameras, the list would be a bit longer.

Here’s a quick recap of all the cameras I’ve ever owned. The latest model is not quite my dream camera, but it gets pretty close…!

Chinon CE4 (1984-86)

I got my first camera when I was a teenager. In those days, there was no such thing as a digital camera, so I had a film Single Lens Reflex (or SLR), and I had to pay for reels of film and the processing cost!

I remember developing my own films at school with a friend called Barnaby Perraton, and I was so enthusiastic that I wasted two colour and black and white 36-exposure films just taking pictures around the house!

I quickly decided that I wanted to become a professional photographer, and I found a course at the London College of Printing that would teach me everything I needed to know. I also bought half a dozen photography books and learned all about the early greats, including Henri Cartier-Bresson.

Everything was going swimmingly until I told my mum about the idea of becoming a professional photographer.

“Well,” she said, “you can always take it up as a hobby later.”

And that was that for 30 years…!

Not many photos survive from those early days, but my parents did keep a box of all my old stuff in the attic for several years. When I eventually fetched it, I had all the photos digitised.

They weren’t very good. I didn’t start out as a wildlife photographer, so most of the shots were just landscapes taken on holiday. We didn’t go on many foreign holidays, but I remember taking my camera to Majorca and the States.

When I was 16, my parents and I visited Amarillo, where there’s a place called the Cadillac Ranch. It’s just a line of old Cadillacs buried in the ground, but it was a good enough subject for a budding photographer…!

Minolta DiMAGE Xt (2004-05)

The only camera I bought as an adult before turning professional was the ultracompact 3 MP Minolta DiMAGE Xt, which could shoot at 2.5 fps. I can’t remember much about it, and I had to examine the EXIF data from one of my old photos to find out which one it was!

I think I must’ve bought it to go skiing, but I only had it for around nine months before leaving it in a hire car somewhere and losing it forever…!

I was living in Brussels with a girl called Anne at the time, and I remember taking pictures in Paris, Brussels and Lake Tahoe with her. Here’s a sample image from our trip to Castle Howard in Yorkshire…

Sony Cyber-shot HX200V (2012-17)

In 2012, I received a random email inviting me to climb Mount Kenya and go on safari the following January. I’d never been to Africa before, so I jumped at the chance. I also wanted to take a few pictures, so I bought a Sony Cyber-shot HX200V for around £300.

It was a bridge camera, which means it had a good zoom (30x optical, 60x digital), but it only had a 1/2.3 type sensor. As soon as I saw the Nikon DSLR of one of the other guests on the trip, I developed camera envy and decided to go the whole hog and get one of my own…!

In the meantime, I fell in love with photography all over again, and I decided to become a professional wildlife photographer. In hindsight, my shots from that trip were pretty poor, but one of the things I liked about the HX200V was the watercolour filter.

I took a load of ‘watercolour’ images, and this one of a Grévy’s zebra is now hanging on the wall of a friend of mine! It was the first framed print I ever sold.

Nikon D800 (2013-17)

When I was thinking about buying my first ‘proper’ camera, I asked the advice of my friend Steve, who was working as a photographer in Australia. He told me to buy either a Canon or a Nikon. As I didn’t want to buy anything from a company that made photocopiers, I went for a Nikon…!

I did a bit of research online and finally went to the London Camera Exchange shop on The Strand to buy a used full-frame Nikon D800 DSLR and a few lenses and accessories. It wasn’t cheap, but I’d saved up enough money by then to buy what I wanted.

At the time, the D800 was the flagship Nikon full-frame DSLR, but the specs haven’t aged well. Camera technology has come on in leaps and bounds since 2013, so it seems crazy that I had to put up with a 36.3 MP sensor and a frame rate of only 4 fps!

Believe me, that was a problem when shooting bears in Alaska, but I still managed to take what ended up being my favourite photo of all time—with due credit to Thomas D Mangelsen’s Catch of the Day…!

Nikon D810 (2016-21)

I soon realised I needed another camera body, so, in 2016, I bought the next camera in the D8xx series, the Nikon D810. The resolution was the same, but the highest frame rate was slightly better at 5 fps.

Now, at last, I could go out with a pair of cameras with different lenses on each one. That was a big step in my photographic career, and I do the same even today as it provides such flexibility.

You can obviously switch focal lengths very quickly without having to change lenses, but you can also dial in different settings on each camera so that you can take wildlife portraits while waiting for the action to happen and then quickly switch camera bodies.

When the D810 was my top camera, I sometimes used to pair it with my 800mm lens, but I mainly used my 80-400mm. Here’s one of the pictures I took with it on a boat ride in Botswana.

Nikon D850 (2018-21)

Shortly after the Nikon D850 came out in 2017, I decided to replace my D800. The D850 was a significant upgrade. It had a higher-resolution, 45.7 MP sensor and a frame rate of 7 fps—which I increased to 9 fps by buying the MB-D18 battery grip.

I immediately paired it with my 800mm lens and swapped my 80-400mm from the D800 to the D810. That was how I operated for three or four years—including my four-month trip to Tanzania and Kenya in 2019.

I took around two-thirds of my images with the D850 (because of the longer reach of the 800mm lens) and the rest with the D810. Occasionally, I’d fit the 1.25x teleconverter to the 800mm lens to create a 1000mm monster! I used that combination to take this portrait of a male lion in the Serengeti.

Sony ⍺1 (2021-)

In 2021, I booked a trip to Arviat in Nunavut, Canada, to photograph the migration of the polar bears. In the run-up, I had a long think about my photography. I was worried that I’d hit some sort of plateau, and I wanted to do something different.

At the time, there was a lot of press coverage of the new mirrorless cameras from Sony and Canon with eye detection and tracking. I read a lot of online articles and watched a good few YouTube videos…and then decided I wanted one myself!

The only problem was that I only had Nikon lenses, and Nikon hadn’t yet brought out their flagship mirrorless camera, the Z9. I didn’t know what to do. I wanted to be able to use the new camera on my Arviat trip, but that meant I wouldn’t be able to try out the Z9. However, if I bought the Sony ⍺1 or Canon R3/R5, I’d have to trade in all my lenses and start from scratch.

In the end, I decided to compromise. I kept my D850 but sold my D810 and 800mm lens and replaced them with a Sony ⍺1 and a Sony 400mm G Master lens. The ⍺1 seemed to be the best wildlife photography camera on the market at the time. It had a 50 MP sensor, a maximum frame rate of 30 fps (shooting lossy compressed Raw files) and the most sophisticated eye detection system available—and the 400mm was as light as a feather!

I took my D850 and ⍺1 to Arviat in November 2021 and Antarctica the following month. In the end, I was so taken with my new mirrorless camera that I hardly used the DSLR at all! The ⍺1’s frame rate and autofocus system were outstanding, and I loved all the customisation options.

(In addition, my 80-400mm lens froze up in Canada, and my D850 was hit by a wave in the Southern Ocean and promptly died on me, so that didn’t help!)

Sony ⍺1 (2022-)

When I got home from Antarctica, I almost immediately traded in every scrap of Nikon gear I had and bought another Sony ⍺1 camera body, plus 12-24mm, 24-70mm, 70-200mm and 600mm G Master lenses!

It was a big investment, and the trade-in value of my Nikon lenses and accessories wasn’t enough to cover it all, so I had to take out a hefty bank loan, but it was worth it…!

Verdict

Photographers all take different paths, using whatever cameras they need—or can afford! I’ve always been a fan of technology, and I’ve generally tried to buy cameras with the best resolution, frame rate and autofocus system I could buy.

I started out with a full-frame SLR film camera, and I ended up with a pair of full-frame mirrorless cameras. Along the way, I’ve experimented with cheap models like the Minolta DiMAGE Xt and the Sony Cyber-shot HX200V, but they served a purpose—if only to tell me what I was missing!

As someone once sang, “God blessed the broken road that led me straight to you…”

If you’d like to order a framed print of one of my wildlife photographs, please visit the Prints page.

If you’d like to book a lesson or order an online photography course, please visit my Lessons and Courses pages.