Welcome to a site specialising in the things that interest me – travel, history and photography in Italy.
About twenty years ago, while posted to England for two years by my Australian employer, I started a website to share my photographs with family and friends. The website was first created in hand-rolled HTML on a text editor (on an Amiga computer!) and although I later used various website authoring tools, it retained a fairly basic “Web 1.0” look.
On return to Australia, I migrated the website to my new ISP, but work got busier and busier and after a few years I stopped updating the website. Eventually I changed my ISP plan, the free web hosting stopped, and the website disappeared.
In more recent years, while travelling for work or pleasure, I would send e-mails, often with pictures attached, to my late parents, to whom were then added my wife’s parents, then our respective siblings, and so on.
I have now entered a phase of life where I will be working much less, and only on things that interest me. I have therefore decided to start again, combining the two aims of sharing my photography and my writing about travel and history, this time using more contemporary web technology to create a site about history and photography in Italy.
My photography has evolved over time as well. The earliest pictures I posted were taken on a Minolta X-300 35mm SLR film camera. That was replaced by a Canon EOS-50e, then by a Canon EOS-3. Then, at about the time when digital was really starting to take off, I had a long think about my photography, and decided to go in the other direction – back to basics. I bought a Hasselblad 500 C/M camera, with no electronics or built-in metering, and started learning to take photographs without artificial assistance.
But I was on a slippery slope, and as more and more professionals got out of film, like many amateurs I was tempted by the newly-affordable second-hand professional film gear that was coming on the market. A series of medium-format rangefinder cameras complemented the Hasselblad, and then I saw an advertisement for a Horseman 45FA large-format camera that took 4×5 inch sheet film images. For several years after that I was of the view that the only real cameras were ones with bellows on the front, and on which one composed upside-down and back-to-front on a ground glass screen. In bright light, one had the additional pleasure of doing it under a cloth, to the embarrassment of one’s wife.
Recently, and ironically just as film started its resurgence, I finally used my impending retirement as an excuse to indulge myself with a 50 MP digital back for my Hasselblad system.
My current (active) photographic gear consists of:
- Hasselblad 501 C/M medium format camera, with A12 and A24 film backs, a CFV-50c digital back, and 40, 60, 80, 150 and 250mm lenses.
- Horseman 45FA large format camera, with 4×5-inch sheet film back, and 6x12cm and 6x17cm roll film backs, and 90, 125, 150, 180 and 210mm lenses by Schneider-Kreuznach, Rodenstock, Fuji and Nikon..
- Nikon Coolscan 9000 and Imacon Flextight II film scanners.
Update: 18 March 2022: Yesterday I took a big step and traded in all my large format gear for a Fujifilm GFX 50R mirrorless medium format digital camera and 32-64mm zoom lens.
Update: March 2023: I found myself using the Fujifilm GFX 50R far more than I did the Hasselblad, so I sold the Hasselblad gear after almost 20 years and bought a Fujifilm X-Pro3 rangefinder and several lenses.
You can find a post about my large format system here.
And the blog name? It isn’t a direct reference to the Homeric hero. The Patroclus was a ship of the Blue Funnel Line that made the run between Liverpool and Hong Kong in the early 1960s. I travelled on it as a small child.
