I do have some rules: the heels stay on...

by Arwendur

I’ve had an interest in photo-
graphy since I was around 11 years old. My grandfather used to shoot, develop and print stills and cine film, mainly of family and friends. He had a small darkroom, and it was fascinating to watch him work and occasionally assist. So I guess I learnt the basics of photography from my grandfather at a young age but from then on I’ve been self-taught.

Having spent a long time in tech-
nical roles in science and engin-
eering, I’ve closely followed the incredible growth and improve-
ment in quality of digital imagery and photography and it’s this improvement that has recently inspired me to pick up a camera again and become more seriously involved in photography.

I mainly use digital technology although I appreciate and occ-
asionally use film. Film has a beauty of its own and my app-
roach to digital photography is

purist, in a sense, as I do very little digital manipulation, if any. I try to digitally mimic the tech-
niques one can use in a trad-
itional darkroom, techniques such as conversions to black-and-
white and sepia or duotoning. Photoshop is a fantastic tool, you can’t really do without it if you shoot digitally but I’d like to think I’m still doing “real” photography, where most of my pictures would still work whether taken on film or imaged on a sensor.

Although most of my pictures can generally be termed “fetish”, I really don’t know if I have any particular style; that’s for viewers to determine, should they want to. In some respects I don’t know what influences me, but photo-
graphy that inspires me comes from the true pioneers of their craft across many genres: fetish, landscape and architecture, also from surrealist art and design. I like the works of Ansel Adams, Helmut Newton, Bob Carlos Clarke, Erwin Olaf, Günter Blum and Melvin Sokolsky, to name a few that come to mind. I love Sokolsky’s Paris 1963 “Bubble” series: amazing execution, his idea inspired by The Garden of Earthly Delights, a 400-year-old Hieronymus Bosch painting.