It's not the size of your lens, it's what you do with it...

I had the pleasure of having a sit-down, a couple of pints and a chat with the multitalented Dave Guttridge a couple of nights ago. If you’ve ever thumbed through a UEA or Center Parcs brochure, you’ll have seen plenty of his photographs; if you’ve ever looked around the Norwich Playhouse bar or the Arts Centre, or wandered through a music festival, and seen a sideburned oddball in a coat and tails playing music from generations even before his own (hello Dave), you’ll have encountered his work too. It was lovely to chat with him. The part of the conversation I really wanted to mention was the point at which we spoke of our favourite work. It would have been so easy for Dave to point to his best photographs and gas on about why they were so good – instead, we chatted about creative, authentic ways around problems we’ve had, from lighting children posing in woodland, to setting up models in windows, in different rooms of a building, to my incident with Norwich-based lawyer Tessa Shepperson, who needed to be photographed against a white background in her own tiny living room. With everything planned, there was a heavy storm, and I had no safe way of taking my lighting over to her house – so I eventually used two desk lamps taken from her living room to light the background, and a flashgun attached to my camera to light Tessa – who was more than pleased with the result:



By no means can I claim perfection here, but our chat was heartening, for the conclusion that often it really is a case of what you do with your camera equipment, not how much you've spent on it!