JOHN WHALER

John is our RB club Chairman a role that he has carried out for nearly ten years and is one of a few photographers still using the traditional darkroom and wet process for making monochrome images. He has not turned his back on digital imaging but for him there is no greater pleasure than using a mechanical camera to capture light on a light sensitive material and then by hand, create the image in the darkroom.

For John, the task of exposing the film, developing and printing and finally mounting the image is all pleasure. It’s a pleasure that he has not found with digital imaging. The digital images he does take very rarely leave the hard drive of the computer and when they do it usually for digital projection.

John has been taking images at night to show familiar sights in a different way and also has started taking images with a pinhole camera. The simplicity of the pinhole camera having no lens gives an overall soft image and infinite depth of field which allows a different perspective and again allows us to use every day items such as manhole cover as points of interest.


His work is purely personal; it’s what he likes and if you do it’s a bonus. His images on this website are copies of prints.