John Eaton Photography

John Eaton

I've been using a camera since 1958 when my father lent me his fold-out Kodak to use on a school trip to Paris. I bought my first camera in 1966 (a used twin-lens Yashica), followed by a succession of various 35mm SLR's. These were used mainly for taking photographs of my children (and now grand-children) and "I was there" photos of holiday destinations.

Even though photography interested and excited me as an artistic medium, my photographic ambitions and motivation didn't rise above the relatively mundane. However, in recent years with the approach of retirement and facing the question as to what to do with all that time, I've rediscovered this passion.

I've re-discovered photography, and black and white photography in particular, as a real passion to explore images of what I see around me, especially architecture and landscape (the interest in architecture comes from the rest of my family -- my father, brother and son are all architects). I'm fascinated by the form and function of buildings that men and women create and equally by those that nature can create.

In these fields my interests are wide -- from the awe of medieval English cathedrals, the simplicity of California's missions, the variety of monuments in Washington DC, the baroque churches of Bavaria and the Tyrol, and the very different architecture of cities such as Beijing, Venice, Oxford and Cambridge.

Similarly in landscapes -- from the ever-changing abstracts of sand-dunes, the raw beauty of winter, the contrast between the serenity of McDonald Lake and the random shapes of tree roots in Glacier National Park, the largely man-made landscapes of Blenheim Palace in England and Nymphenburg, Schleissheim, Linderhof and Herrenchiemseee palaces in Bavaria, the shifting patterns of beaches and seascapes, to the Lake District.

And in both of these areas I often find that a new and different perspective can be gained by use of the infra-red part of the spectrum to record the images.

Black and white images are what interest me most and I moved to using medium-format film cameras (Rollei and Silvestri) as my interests in landscape and architecture came to the fore. However, in the past couple of years I have moved almost solely to using a variety of digital cameras -- and I also do all of my own printing on an HP Z3100.