Devonshirephotographer.com
Photography by Peter Simmons
I am a Devon based photographer who has been a keen enthusiast for many years!
My interest started as young lad when my father gave me a Minolta 110 cartridge film camera, this was a time when you had to send your film off in the post to places like Truprint, being young it was exciting to see what you get back, but it also made you impatient having to wait for the results. Roll forward a few years and we now have digital cameras, you can take as many photographs as you want and see the results straight away, this has made photography accessible to everyone and obviously you have cameras in phones now too.
What photography means to me, is the time and effort in setting up a shot, deciding the aperture, shutter speed and ISO, you also have to choose the composition of the picture you are trying to capture, when you have done all of the planning and taken the shot, you then need to edit your picture to tweak the image, I'm not one for spending hours on a computer editing the picture, if it needs lots of time editing, it's a bin job in my opinion and I should have set up the shot better in the first place.
I have had numerous cameras by various manufactures over the years, in order of ownership:-
Minolta 110 cartrigde film
Zenith 35mm film camera
Practica MTL3 35mm film camera
Canon A1 35mm film camera
Canon eos 3 35mm camera
Canon eos 300D First digital camera
Canon eos 20D, 5D Digital cameras
Nikon 1 Digital camera
Fuji X20. X70, X-T1 & X-H1 Digital cameras
Leica Q2, SL2s & SL2 Digital cameras ( Current kit )
If I knew then what I know now, I would have bought straight into Leica, cameras now are over complicated and are trying to to be an all in one photo and video camera with numerous menus and buttons, for photography I like to keep it simple and Leica does that and has superb image quality and build quality. With all the money I have spent over the years on all the kit listed and all the lenses I bought and sold, It probably would have been cheaper to have bought straight into the Leica system, it also holds its value better as they don't saturate the market with lots of models and updated versions, so a bit of advice for all those looking at buying a camera system, look at what you want to achieve and research which system gives you that and also look at the depreciation that system has in value over time, then consider if buying a premium brand would be a better option.
feel free to look at my photography on my website by using the link below and you can also click the social buttons for email or my Facebook page