My dad did not pass the photography gene to me

That’s because he never had it.

Our family photos were typically taken on some kind of Kodak Instamatic using 110 film cassettes. At least one of our heads would be cut off and any half successful prints would be framed and set on display in the bright sunlight to quickly fade into near invisibility.

Any ability or skill I have came from my mother’s side and skipped a generation. Whilst she was a competent draughts-woman and very artistic and ‘crafty’, I never knew her to take a single photo. My maternal grandfather and uncles were all photographers, with one even working at the Leica factory in Wetzlar.

That maternal Grandfather, ‘Opa’, gave me my first ‘SLR’ (Single Lens Reflex) camera from Braun when I was probably 14 or 15. The Americans and the Germans can fight over the pronunciation! I recall it had at least two lenses, something like a 35 mm ‘standard’ lens and a 135 mm telephoto. Pretty sure they both had leaf shutters inside the lenses. There was a ‘built-in’ light meter over the lens mount (no through-the-lens ‘TTL’ metering in those days). You’d set aperture and shutter speed appropriately based on the meter reading and focus manually using the ‘split screen’. This particular model had a cunning mechanical linkage, that once exposure was correctly set, allowed you to vary both aperture and shutter speed continuously and inversely so that you could favour depth of field (smaller apertures) to ensure close-ups were in focus from front to back of the image, or faster shutter speeds for action photography. It was a neat idea that I have never seen on other cameras.

As was common back in the day, I shot slides as well as negative films for prints. Usually trying to carefully eke out 38 frames from a roll of 36.

I had a pretty good hit rate with most shots coming out in focus and properly exposed. Trust me, that was no mean feat in itself. I’d shoot a lot of landscapes and a few pictures of the family. Even being trusted on occasion to test my knowledge of the inverse square law when setting up complex indoor hotshoe-mounted flash photography. To this day, I hate flash photography and will always try to get a hand-held shot with natural lighting instead. I guess I never learned how to do it right.

The Braun camera came to an untimely end when it jumped off the back of my bicycle as I bombed down a steep hill in Sandown on the Isle of Wight.

Hello Pentax MX SLR, with 50 mm f/1.7 lens, you little beauty!

At sixteen, we had the option to study a wide range of less academic subjects, so alongside Pure Mathematics & Statistics, Chemistry and Biology, I took photography.

I put my heart into this subject, unlike my academic studies, spending as much time as I could, and as much money as the art department’s budget would allow, developing and printing black and white pictures and getting together a portfolio mounted on ugly, rough grey cardboard. I also discovered a 120 roll film camera in our house and took half decent shots with it too, contact-printing the negatives to 6x9 cm prints.

It didn’t hurt that my 16-year-old crush also took the same photography class. Having said that, she was in the same Maths class as me too #notastalker.

Laying my portfolio out on the tables in the art department, I was acutely conscious of the lack of enthusiasm and encouragement from the teaching staff.

Whilst technically competent, my pictures weren’t that good.

Undeterred, I applied for a place at Trent Polytechnic to study photography and got an interview date.

Due to absentmindedness on my part I missed the interview. They were not overly sympathetic when I asked if it was too late for another chance, and they explained that they had sufficient applicants.

Oh well.

It was not to be.

Following what would nowadays be called a ‘pivot’, I got a place at Cardiff University to study Microbiology and Genetics, which I switched at the end of the first year, to Zoology and Genetics.

And here I am.

Still taking competent photographs, mostly on my iPhone. The percentage of ‘good’ or memorable shots is still low, but I think it is creeping up.

But I am still no artist.

I have recently began to tinker once more with a ‘proper’ camera. After diving into the digital photography revolution with gusto and years of spending too much money on Fujifilm cameras and on big heavy Nikon gear that did not up my artistic game - it’s amazing how easy it was to still take an uninspiring picture with an expensive camera - I have recently bought a tiny used Olympus E-P7 mirrorless camera and kit lens.

I like it, but it is so much less convenient to use. It does not know where it is, as it has no built in GPS, which to me is one of the most significant advances with cellphone cameras for record keeping and documenting what you did and where you did it #sciencenerd.

Cellphone cameras are amazing in that you don’t have to train for years to become technically competent to take a well-exposed, in-focus picture. With that friction and burden removed, the photographer can focus on composition, timing, and the ‘art’ of the shot.

The equipment gets out of the way and lets you focus on the creative process.

This is something we strove for when creating #esource software for real time data capture in high pressure, early phase trial environments, where you only had one chance to do it right.

I am very conflicted though, as I attended the #dolectures in Wales last month and there were at least three people I talked to shooting film. One of them sends off her completed rolls to be processed, and rather than getting prints back, she gets high resolution digital scans of the negatives. I think I am going to try that with my old Pentax #oldschool.

Is this the right way to address the artistic side?

Slow things down?

Make things more deliberate?

Limit yourself to the number of pictures you can take?

Have faith in your technique?

Wait with excitement for the pictures to come back from the developer!

With the advent of the iPhone, my father was finally able to take a picture with everybody’s head included.

The technology got out of the way.

We have made huge progress in recent years in improving #esource software for clinical research, such that it is beginning to get out of our way. Researchers, nurses and doctors should not need to think about the tools they are using, they need to be able to focus on the well-being of the participants in clinical trials.

We need to be able to allow them to address the ‘art’ of healthcare and research, and they should be able to rely on the software and systems to take care of the science and the data for them.