Interview with Dr Alain Landes

It all started with a simple Canonet fixed lens camera while on holiday from my SHO post at St George’s Hyde Park Corner. I got some pleasing results with it and began studying the subject in the very few moments of spare time available to me. I soon purchased the best Canon SLR I could afford and joined the Royal Photographic Society. One of the Fellows there was a senior Consultant at my hospital and was kind enough to constructively criticise my efforts.

My skill lies mainly in portrait photography including animals as I try to capture a brief moment of the lives of my subjects. I am now making efforts to improve my landscape photography as it requires me to slow down my thinking and consider composition more strictly.

In later years I have been able to travel fairly widely, often to satisfy my need to photograph wildlife and foreign lands. My favourite location is Botswana as it is far less crowded than many other African countries. Often 100,000 acres can be covered by less than six jeeps. However you have to drive a lot more to reach the game. In the private sanctuaries in South Africa the distances are much smaller and the chances of seeing wildlife pretty much guaranteed at the cost of far more crowding around the animals and far more expense.

For street photography of interesting individuals London and Paris offer all you could ever want.

The most fascinating location for photography was a trip my wife and I took in Japan travelling on our own by train and bus. Nobody there speaks any other language; I made the mistake of learning some Japanese. The locals were delighted by my efforts but unfortunately I could not understand their replies!

The country and cities are the cleanest you could imagine and the people totally delightful, very polite and helpful. It is like travelling to another planet as they behave totally differently to any other people we have met. They are brutally honest and hard-working and tipping is considered a bit of an insult. They perform every job with total dedication and pride: a tip implies that they made a special effort above normal which would be an alien concept to them.

Japan has no obese people that we saw, the elderly walk or cycle into what seems very old age and when they end up in wheelchairs they are always accompanied by their children or grandchildren taking care of them!
They do not venerate old buildings in the face of modern needs but dismantle them and rebuild them in the centuries old traditions, by craftsmen of have kept these skills alive. It is they who are considered the treasures of Japan.

I had to abandon my extensive Canon DSLR outfit as my back and the ever stricter regulations concerning hand luggage took their toll. I have now replaced it with an Olympus Micro 4/3rds system which is half the weight but still produces professional standard results. I have a quite extensive outfit and would rather improve the lenses than buy lots more equipment. Their pro equipment is truly waterproof and has better specification but is more costly.

The arrival of digital cameras has been a revolution and took a little time to be accepted. They now are cheaper than analogue versions and compare very favourably in terms of results.

The main advantages are two-fold. You can see your results as you take the photos and correct exposure, white balance and composition as you go along, if you are shooting raw. You are not limited by a 36 exposure limit but you have to be careful not to go mad.

Secondly, once you have bought your kit there is very little running costs unlike the purchase and developing of film. The result of this is that you become more adventurous in your technique and are willing to try more experimental photography. Fundamentally you learn mainly from your mistakes and it is such a delight to be able to delete them at will and not have that dreadful disappointment when your film and prints arrive back with no usable results.

Of course, you do not print many of your best photos and they are destined to sit in your computer unseen and ultimately lost as the hardware crashes, changes or you die. I cannot see my children ploughing through all my files looking for the few gems. That is why I now make the effort to print my favourite photos to a large size or into a book. This last trend is not really that expensive and is the easiest way to share your photos.

Photographers are guilty of taking hundreds of identical photos with their fast motor drives and then wasting enormous amounts of time going through them, far more than actually taking them!

Another disadvantage is that the latest trend is to manipulate, improve or alter photos or indeed just steal them. This has proved a catastrophe for photo-journalism, competition or historical endeavours. Fortunately there is usually a digital trail but people have lost faith in the veracity of photographs and unscrupulous individuals often emerge.

Eight years of working a busy 1-in-2 on-call rota and then having a young family did restrict the time I had for any hobbies but I persevered whenever I could. Retirement has provided ample opportunity to indulge my various hobbies. The freedom to get up in the morning and decide what I am doing that day is wonderful after all those years of having no choice in my daily timetable.

I recommend anyone to retire as soon as possible. The limiting stage is to recognise when you can afford it to live as you want to and avoid being greedy for income. I have seen too many colleagues carry on far too long in order to get a maximum pension and then succumb to disastrous illness before they could enjoy the fruits of their life-long industry. I truly enjoyed my working life but do not miss it.