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John's Photography
Website visitors have often asked how we became interested in Kite Aerial Photography, so here's the tale... John's earliest recollection of an interest in photography was from about the age of 6 when he used to run around pretending to take photos of people with a toy camera. He would then scurry off and draw a picture of the people he had photographed and then dash back to give them their 'instant photo'! In his early teens, in recognition of his obsession, John was bought a second-hand Zenit 3m SLR by his dad. With this camera he would take photos at night, outside, during and after thunderstorms, also of anyone who would hold still for long enough, and anything of scientific interest, including Newton's rings, and electrostatic phenomena, like charged water droplets floating on water.
After leaving school, like many students of physics, John had projects where he 'photographed' the internal atomic structure of crystals using X-rays and he also produced diffraction patterns from foils with the aid of an electron beam from a Van de Graaff accelerator. After his physics degrees, John continued his studies in biomedical sciences, where he was introduced to photo-microscopy, which, later in life, led to him developing a simple technique for photographing cells on the surface of biological tissues. (Stain Technology, 63,3,189,1988 & Journal of Biological Education, 25, 1, 3, 1991)
It was during his student days that he first experimented with corona discharge photography, a technique of contact or near contact photography using a continuous electrostatic discharge. He also continued his interest in night photography (with a £14 second-hand Yashica 'baby' 4x4 twin lens reflex camera) leading to his images being published in camera magazines, the first in Amateur Photographer and the second one (see below) winning him his first auto/manual exposure SLR.
Later, he also found that light could be transmitted down unpigmented, grey hairs! (Nature, 338, 23, 2 March 1989) Most of John's publications after 1973 were in scientific journals, but images often played a crucial part. In the 1990s, John's interest in photography declined until we moved to Armadale. When we created the Armadale website in June 2006, we agreed that it should feature lots of photos of the town. Many of the first ones taken were of the area we lived in and of the proprietors and workers in local shops. By 2007, we were trying to find new ways of capturing the town as it was changing fast and we wanted a photographic record of its development. Fred and Ivy Apperley, two experienced kiteflyers and makers, had presented us with kites in the past, and Rosie had made kites with children in playschemes and during end-of-term activities at schools where she taught. Therefore the answer to our search was obvious. We attached a camera to a kite string...and there was no looking back......................just down !
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