About Dave..
He grew up in Chester Hill, NSW. He is the son of Scottish immigrants who came to Australia in the early 1960s.
Dave started off in photography at the age of 12, in 1979. During school holidays, he used to stay up late and watch the late movies on channel 9. The midnight to dawn program was hosted by Issy Dye who is still performing to this day, and is hopefully not as corny as his show was way back then…
During these late night sessions, they frequently had advertising from a camera shop.. He can’t recall which one it was, possibly Fletchers Fotographics. They were running adverts for a Russian camera kit called a Zenit Photosniper. It had a rifle type stock, a pistol trigger shutter release and a big Tair 300mm lens. When Dave saw this, being a typical 12 year old, he thought it looked really cool, and looked like a gun! He wanted one!
After a couple of months of whining, his parents finally gave in to his demands, and purchased the kit for him. Little were they to know, they were now also going to be his personal taxi service, taking him to places in order to practice his new found hobby.
The Zenit ES camera that the kit came with was fully manual. Manual focus, manual exposure setting, you even had to manually stop down the aperture! It had no TTL metering; just a photocell that moved a little pointer on the top plate of the camera, and you read your exposure from there.
The most popular outing was a trip to Parramatta Park, in Sydney’s west. It’s not that the park had anything remarkable to photograph, but it was a good compromise – Dave could take photos while his parents had a picnic lunch.
He also conned his parents into answering an advertisement in the Trading Post, and got hold of some second hand darkroom equipment. He could now process his own photographs, and thought he ruled the world, although his parents tightly controlled the finances, and were not amused at his insistence for film and chemicals. Back then, you could usually buy the processing chemicals at the larger chemist shops!
The Photosniper kit served Dave well, and was used into his late teens, with his parents taking him to various places to sharpen his skills, including Oran Park, a motor racing venue on Sydney’s south western outskirts (now a housing estate). He still has some of his old negatives from these days.The Photosniper kit resided under his fathers bed, until a couple of years ago, when Dave sold it on Ebay, a move that he now regrets.
Into his early twenties, and becoming a car enthusiast, the Photosniper got a brief reprieve, but the darkroom gear had mostly been retired. His mother finally had her laundry back!
Around this time, Dave purchased a Canon T-70, with a 50mm lens, a medium zoom lens (he can’t recall the length) and a 500mm f5.0 telephoto lens.
He tried his hand at photographing numerous Formula 1 events in Adelaide, with quite successful results. In fact, some of his favourite shots of all time were captured in Adelaide using his T-70 with the 500mm lens and a 2x teleconverter, hand held, from the grandstands! Given the extreme nature of these shots, they have been captured magnificently.
He bought a Harley Davidson Softail motorcycle in 1992 at the age of 26, and the SLR camera got relegated to storage until the end of time. Due to being unable to carry large objects on the Harley, he used mostly point-and –shoot cameras for more years than he cares to remember, and he certainly wasn’t interested in the aesthetics of his photography, it was all just snapshots.
He worked a lot, he bought a house, he got married. Photography wasn’t on the agenda for a lot of years. He also didn’t have a high regard for the early digital cameras, they were nowhere near the quality of a good film camera.He got heavily involved in the restoration of old motorcycles, and this took up a lot of his time and finances. At one stage he owned 17 motorcycles! Sadly, he only documented one restoration.
A good friend of his then bought a Nikon D90. Dave was curious, and went with memory card in hand to try it out. He liked it. A lot.
Something twigged. Maybe it was a nostalgic notion, who knows, but it twigged with a voracity that hadn’t been seen since he was begging his parents for that first Photosniper kit. He wanted another camera, and he wanted it now.
But what did he want? He knew he was going to get Nikon or Canon, but which?
Dave joined numerous photography forums, and got nothing buy blah blah blah… Nikon users reckon Nikon is best, Canon users reckon Canon is best.. It’s been going on for years.
He was using a Nikon point-and-shoot at the time, and was leaning towards Nikon.. He was either going to buy a Nikon D300 or a Canon 7D. It was probably the longest time he had ever taken to made a decision. The winner turned out to be Canon, for no other reason than the fondness he had for his old T-70.
He bought the Canon 7D, and the rest they say, is history. Well, sort of. He hadn’t bought a lens yet, the idiot!
After a lot of looking at reviews, he decided the first lens he was getting was a Canon EF-S 10-22mm ultrawide zoom. He wanted to do some nice landscape shots. He was very impressed with that little lens, it’s quality was astounding, but it certainly was ultrawide! Next up was a general purpose “walk around” lens. The Canon EF 24-105mm f4L. Beautiful. He was set up now and wouldn’t need anything else.
Like I said previously, idiot!
The equipment has expanded slightly now. There is a lot more than when he first started. We’ll leave that for another chapter, I’ll link to it below.
Dave lives in Campbelltown NSW, a long way from anything worth photographing. But when he can get out and shoot, it makes it all worthwhile. DustyDog was conceived in 2012, but lack of a comprehensive portfolio has held it back a while. Dave works in an unrelated job, and has trouble finding time to get out and shoot, but it’s coming together slowly.
