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Cameras

I have three 35mm bodies, all Nikons: an F5, an F80 and F801. The F801 was a twenty-first birthday present and got me started in photography. I bought the F80 in 2000, just before leaving for a trip to Europe. I bought the F5 in early 2006 after Nikon announced they're discontinuing most of their film cameras. As I couldn't quite stretch the budget to an F6, and there were good deals on F5s, I thought it an opportunity not to miss. So far, I'm loving it. The F80 is now my day-to-day second body, which suits just fine, because it's light, no fuss and performs admirably. The F801 is now probably best described as enjoying a leisurely retirement - used occasionally, but not too much.

At this stage I'm not switching to digital. I still don't feel the price to performance ratio makes change compelling. However, especially with the recent release of the D3, the time when I will change over is not far off. I'm not especially wedded to a particular process or type of gear: my philosophy is to use the best tool to capture and present the image.

Lenses

There have been a few changes in the lens lineup in the last year. I traded in my AF24mm f2.8 on an AFS17-35mm f2.8 and my AF300mm f4 on the AFS version. I also bought the TC14EII and TC14EII to complement the 300mm for the trip to Antarctica. I still have the AF60mm Micro f2.8 and AF80-200mm f2.8. As you'll see from the image pages, I used and got quality images from all of them on my Antarctica trip. The 80-200mm is still one of my favourites, but I think the 17-35mm is going to give it a run for its money.

Tripod

I also upgraded my tripod during the year. I still use the Arca Swiss B1 but, after much deliberation, decided on a Gitzo 3540LS. I replaced the top plate with a Kirk FP-300 and the slightly awkward Arca Swiss lever top plate with a Really Right Stuff B2PROII clamp. The sum total of all those changes is I now feel I have a much more robust and user friendly tripod setup. Both camera bodies have L brackets from Kirk, which make vertical format shots a breeze.

Film & filters

I use ISO 50 Fuji Velvia almost exclusively and Pan F very occasionally. Generally speaking, I'm not a fan of filters for colour photography. I occasionally use a polariser or a grad ND and that's it. I use Lee filters.

Digital Darkroom

My scanner is a Nikon Coolscan V. I run Photoshop CS2 on a Dell Latitude D820 running 2.2GHz Duo processors with 2GB of 667MHz RAM. As my PC is a laptop, I've got it hooked up to a Dell 20 inch flat panel via a DVI connection. The monitor is profiled using Pantone's OptiCAL and Spyder.

My approach is to pursue the "truth" of my vision for each image - much as one would in a conventional wet darkroom - so I basically use Photoshop for cropping, colour balance and tonal correction.