How my interest in nature photography arose and developed
I had been very much a nature person from at least the age of 5 (I was born in 1942). It started with my keeping caterpillars and studying pond life (including the multitudes of microscopic organisms), and progressed through my making a collection of Lepidoptera (butterflies and moths) and keeping in my bedroom as 'pets' a variety of animals - primarily reptiles and small mammals, many of them exotic species.
During that time I also developed a keen interest in meteorology and cloud formations, and came to love watching thunderstorms. I learnt basics of meteorology from books of which we seem not to have the like today; they were clear, direct and informative, with none of the 'dumbing down' which characterizes books on weather which I've seen more recently. As a child I quickly got impatient with books that dumbed down. If I was going to learn at all I wanted to learn properly. The sort of nature books that I avidly read were ones like Ralph Buchsbaum's Animals Without Backbones and certain of the New Naturalist series - and of course I used identification guides such as Richard South's Moths of the British Isles. For meteorology, I remember two particular books I learnt greatly from were The Weather Map and Meteorology for Aviators, both published by HMSO and unavailable probably for decades now.
I was well aware that my collecting and pet-keeping activities were unhealthy for me in important ways, no matter how much I gained from them, and when my father gave me a camera as a 21st-birthday present in 1963 I took this as a cue to phase out the 'pets' and collect only photographs. I quickly progressed to a couple of Pentax single-lens reflex cameras, using a relatively large, hand-held electronic flash (i.e. not mounted on the camera) to illuminate all my close-ups of insects.
At that stage I was concentrating on insects, and selling photos was far from my mind. In 1972 I discontinued the photography and indeed any active natural history interest, but in 1978, while studying as a mature student at Exeter University, I tentatively started nature photography again - this time with a much broader natural history basis - primarily insects, plants, lichens and fungi, and wild scenery, this soon to tie in neatly with my greatly augmented enthusiasm for hiking in wild and rugged places.
I then armed myself with a couple of more modern Pentax SLR cameras, and built up a large photo collection which came to take me a horrendous amount of time in cataloguing, remounting and labelling the colour transparencies, and sought to get some income from these.
I got 'in' with the regional Workers' Educational Association and ran adult education courses on natural history for them, basing them on selections of my transparencies, with some field trips. I also gave one-off slide talks to local organizations.
However, getting 'in' with photo agencies, which was where I'd assumed most money would lie, proved problematical. Generally speaking, they were not interested in my 'naturalist' approach to photography, in which I photographed plant and animal life with their natural background as part of the picture, and photographed what took my fancy. No, they wanted 'their' photographers to be mobile and travel around photographing what their clients wanted - and I had little stomach for operating in that way. Also, being a non-driver put considerable limitations on my mobility to go to places to get specific photos for which there was demand.
The outcome was that only one agency (Oxford Scientific Films) took any of my photos at all, and they took only a very small number, from which I only got a very occasional small fee. This was clearly not worthwhile for me.
I'd also produced regular nature articles with photos for The Great Outdoors magazine from 1984 to 1986, but had troublesome experiences with that magazine and the publishing side of things generally. Then in 1990 I felt I'd had enough of all this - just when I broke out into writing novels - and so I stopped the photography, and in 1998 I actually disposed of my photo collection, having no idea that I could have important uses for some of the photos in my then still infant website. The Devon Wildlife Trust took over the part of the photo collection relating to British natural history, and the Alpine Garden Society took over the very large part which was devoted to my nature photos (mostly flowering plants) in the Alps and Pyrenees.
In 2000, for what I was seeing as probably my final visit to the Scottish Highlands, I was so frustrated by my lack of photos to use in my websites, that I bought a little Fuji compact digital camera and used this, subsequently using it on some of my hikes. This was useful for that purpose, but the photos were not sharp enough to be of saleable quality. Also, this was not really suited to extreme close-ups.
Clear Mind Photos' serendipitous beginning
In May 2007 I attended an Energy Awareness Training workshop with Stephen and Lynda Kane, immediately followed by a personal consultation with them. Among the whole package of life-enhancement practices and measures I took back home from them and put into everyday use was the ability to test for strengthening and weakening energy influences in my life and surroundings - one of the results of which was my establishing a number of Feng Shui enhancements that I needed to carry out in order to make my flat a healthier place for me to be living in. Among these required enhancements was the placing of photos of foliage and trees in a woodland setting, and a photo of green rolling hills, on the walls of my living space in certain specific positions.
For this purpose I wanted good quality photos, and had an outing with my little Fuji compact camera to take the requisite photos. In the event I found that none of what I'd taken was sharp enough, and so, having discovered a dearth of suitable photos on the Internet (and those that were suitable were subject to eye-wateringly high usage fees), I decided to get a better camera and try again.
What I ended up with was a Fuji Finepix S6500fd, which is of an extremely versatile SLR-like design, of a much higher standard than my little compact camera, and has masses of 'bells and whistles' in terms of functionality. Once I started using it the notion came to me to start a new website for selling photos taken with this camera - and that's how the Clear Mind Photos project quite serendipitously came into existence.
I should emphasize that the Finepix S6500fd does NOT have my full recommendation, and after a bit over 2 months I replaced it with another model. Yes, the S6500 is tremendously versatile with its slightly more than 10x optical zoom range (equivalent to 28-300mm focal length on a 35mm film camera) and huge sensitivity range, but I found its automatic exposure programs troublesome, tending to get exposure wrong, so I commonly had to repeat photos with different settings and indeed different programs in the hope of getting a correctly exposed shot. The camera for some reason didn't invite me to use its manual exposure mode, which was in any case inadequately implemented.
Another limitation I found with the S6500 was that I couldn't simply set the lens to infinity focus, which is what I wanted for distant views and especially cloud formations. Indeed, this was a particular nuisance with the latter, because very often the auto-focus mechanism failed to find clear enough edges in the cloud formations for it to function, yet if I lowered the viewpoint to auto-focus on the horizon, then often the exposure was wrongly set for the clouds.
Yet another limitation - very frustrating - was that the super-macro mode (required for extreme close-ups) wouldn't operate except with the lens set at its widest angle. What this means is that those close-ups were physically just too extreme, sometimes with the protective filter on the front of the lens mount almost touching the subject (scaring away most insects or other small animal life), and in any case, at that degree of closeness the camera or other part of myself tended to cast a shadow within the picture area, so making it pointless to take the photo. Also, super-macro mode doesn't allow flash to be used - yet it's just for such extreme close-ups where flash can often be essential. It's true that the 2x digital zoom can still be used so that I could be a bit more physically removed from the subject, but unfortunately, as with other cameras, digital zoom results in a much poorer picture quality, so, having tried it, I decided not to use it any more.
So, some silly limitations of this otherwise excellent camera made it something of a frustration for me and denied me quite a number of shots which its basic specifications ought to be able to cope with just fine. Of course, this situation could hardly be surprising, for when I chose and bought the camera I'd no notion of setting up this Clear Mind Photos project, and so I wasn't looking for a very 'serious' camera.
Then in early August 2007 a 'chance' hitch-hiking encounter with Cliff Smith of TrustedReviews.com pointed me to getting the Fuji Finepix S9600, which I soon purchased. This does have some of the limitations of the S6500, such as the abovementioned limitation with use of super-macro mode and there being no setting of the lens for infinity focus, but it is designed much more with the serious photographer in mind, and is much more supportive to using manual exposure settings. Although it is a 9 megapixel camera as against the 6 megapixels of the S6500, it seems disappointing for image quality - because apparently it uses the same lens as the S6500, which means that the same lens resolution and chromatic aberrations towards the edges are enlarged more when each image is seen at full size - so at full size the pictures all look less sharp and more spoiled with chromatic aberration. Basically in my view it would have been better to keep the image resolution to 6 megapixels - but there is no 6 megapixel setting, the nearest being 5 megapixels. So reluctantly I'm using the camera at full pixel resolution, which is really rather wasteful as in my view that doesn't really bring any benefit over 6 megapixels.
However, it is at least much easier for me to use manual mode of the S9600 and get correctly exposed pictures, and its viewfinder system is much clearer and more accurate, so making the taking of pictures much easier.
Also, as far as I can tell, the S9600's auto-focus mechanism is more sensitive, so that I won't so often get refusal to focus on clouds. In any case, because I'm using manual exposure mode at least most of the time, if necessary I can get the camera to focus on the horizon and use the shutter release button to lock the focus while I move the camera to point at the clouds I want to photograph, the exposure already having been set manually.
If you want to see the results that I've got from the two cameras, please note that I indicate for each photo which camera was used. However, because the images on this site are lower resolution copies of the originals, actually you won't be able to see any difference between the results from the two cameras.
The Clear Mind Photos 'philosophy'
In Clear Mind Photos, then, I stay away from the normal commercial or professional photographers' approach of taking photos to satisfy client or agency demand, and instead I offer photos of subjects that interest me and give me some sort of positive 'buzz'. This should mean that the photos that I present here communicate to viewers something of my own experience of empathy with and delight in Nature in its broadest sense.
The Clear Mind Photos collection, as I have already indicated, is a completely new collection and still 'young'. I have other interests and activities, so I'm not going out all over the place to take photos, but rather, am photographing what appeals to me on my hiking outings - whether it be wild flowers, animal life, particular wild scenery, cloud formations or particular outdoor pursuits with which I feel an empathy, such as paragliding or surfing.