Interview with Dr James Roxburgh

From very early on as my father and grandfather were keen photographers.

My grandfather was in the navy serving as a ship’s doctor before the outbreak of WWI and then served during the war. He documented his time with his camera and we gave many of his photographs from that time to the Imperial War Museum as we did not want them to just gather dust in the attic. There are a lot of family photos too – amazing photos of his family going skiing in 1910 with the women all in long billowing skirts and long wooden skis poking out from under the hem. They would have spent all day climbing up a mountain in Crans-Montana for just one downhill run.

My father, who had cameras for as long as I can remember would often tell me about my grandfather’s passion to document everything with his camera. I played with his old cameras but then he gave me my own real camera, a Carl Zeiss Werra, when I was 7 and I have been acquiring cameras ever since!

I loved the thrill of taking photographs and then waiting for the negatives to come back. I learnt as I went and I bought lots of books by great photographers to learn more. At school we had dark rooms so I could do a lot of printing and developing which I enjoyed. It’s the same things I enjoyed that made me want to be a surgeon – using your hands, thinking differently, creating something you had control over.

I went to university and like many things it went into abeyance – you couldn’t have a flat in London and print and develop your own photographs. The big breakthrough came when digital photography which was sufficiently good quality to match film became affordable. I bought my first Canon digital camera in 2003. The price of that was the same as one now but with 10 times less capability! I’ve always had a camera with me much to my wife and children’s frustration until they see the results that is.

My first proper computer cost me £2000 in 1986 and had a 20megabyte hard drive. My brother had just come back from America and had a portable which weighed 35lbs and was the size of a small suitcase. Now £2000 would buy you a top of the range iMac. The consequence of that is you’re trapped into a never-ending cycle because the software advances and your hardware stops working so you enter the next cycle of Apple products! Technology has made photography much easier to do but you have to be careful that the software doesn’t take over your work. You want something that just helps you recreate what you shot and the impressions you had at that time. I hope I do that but some people take Photoshop too far and it becomes the master and not the photographer.

Many people still use traditional methods of photography and some do both but the practicalities of running your own dark room are onerous. There is only so much time you have. In the end I want images that are representative of where I’ve been and what I’ve done that are technically good and have, I hope, a degree of artistic merit.

I did a lot of printing for a while when I applied to become a Licentiate of the Royal Photographic Society. This is the first stage of three possible distinctions from the Society. I had to submit a portfolio of 10 -12 prints of varying subjects to show my ability as a photographer. You then had to go to Bath to display them in front of everyone else who was applying. Luckily, I had gained a thick skin from multiple college and medical school exams so being “examined” in front of everyone else was not a new experience. I passed that stage and will now work towards a portfolio for the next stage which is to become an Associate.

The first time I used a computer properly was for my thesis and everyone was paranoid about losing their work. In those days you had everything on multiple 5-inch floppy disks so there were copies in the office, in the Prof’s office and at home. As my wife will tell me, I’m obsessive compulsive to some degree but I think that’s quite useful if you’re a cardiac surgeon! So I have everything backed up in the Cloud and backed up on two separate hard drives at home. So unlike negatives and slides which take up a lot of space and eventually deteriorate over time digital images will last but it would be foolish to store them in only one place. A single drive failure and all your images are gone. It used to be eye-wateringly expensive for storage but now data storage is cheap which is lucky as photographs take up a lot more space than they used to. By the time I finish with a Photoshop file it can be half a gigabyte.

My photography often comes from our travels. Mainly landscapes but I like architecture, buildings and macro photography which give me different shapes and angles. I now have an infrared camera which is a very interesting for taking different variations of black and white photos. Some people only take portraits but that’s never appealed, partly as taking my own children’s photos can be so traumatic!

I’ve been very lucky on our holidays to photograph a wide range of animals in their natural surroundings. My daughter did three months working at a school near Dar es Salaam so we went on safari from there. We also spent 10 years enjoying horseback riding holidays in the Rockies so horses in the spectacular Montana landscape has always been popular. We went to this deserted beach near Dunedin and arrived to find 40 sea lions and no people! That was a great day.

We’ve always travelled whether with the children or on our own. We managed one trip last year to Greece for about 10 days but it’s been pretty frustrating having to stay put. We had a five-week trip down the West coast of South America which was cancelled. We have now rebooked two trips next year – one to America and another to Australia and New Zealand.

We spent five weeks in New Zealand a few years back and didn’t think we needed to go back but now realise we really should.

We do a lot of walking so even not being able to go on walking holidays has been tedious. It is not just the walking, we love Italian food and wine so the last 3 trips have been to various parts of Umbria and Tuscany. However, the South-West Coastal Path is on the list for next year and so there will some spectacular seascapes to capture and great seafood to eat.

Our South American trip is one I’m looking forward to immensely. My daughter is very keen to see the gorillas in Rwanda and that would be very special. My wife is the holiday planner and likes to have at least one or two in the system. She has the knack of finding those places that are just off the beaten track so I am sure there are some interesting trips in the pipeline.