Archive Archives - Tim Gander, Photographer, Bristol

May 21, 2025May 27, 2025 by Tim Gander

25 Years of Digital (almost)

A few days ago I ventured into our attic where I came across the storage cases for my early digital work; 340 CDs and DVDs dating from November 2000.

It didn’t immediately register that this means I’ve been shooting digitally for almost 25 years! I reckon I only shot film for about the first 10 years of my career, which is another sobering thought on multiple levels.

The Time Had Finally Come

But seeing those cases of CDs for the umpteenth *damn* time, I finally decided to bring them down and start transferring them to a hard drive. The discs won’t last forever, especially being alternately boiled and frozen in the attic. Eventually the hard drive too will die and my archive will be landfill.

Brief side-note; apart from properly (expensively) stored negatives, transparencies or prints, no photographic format is immune from decay over time. I’m convinced that no amount of care can preserve digital images indefinitely, and analogue formats will always be more robust. But that’s a separate discussion.

Old Tech to the Rescue

Anyway, back to the plot. I’ve rigged up an older MacBook Pro with the DVD reader/writer I used to use, and connected a spare external hard drive. It’ll be my archiving station until the project is done.

Your job now is to rejoice as I share some of those early digital images. Don’t worry, you won’t have to suffer this until the 50th anniversary, when I’ll be in my early 80s. I doubt my nurse will let me near a computer by then.

Enjoy!

PY Gerbeau (left) and the then deputy Prime Minister John Prescott at a press conference staged on the roof of the Millennium Dome in London.

P-Y Gerbeau (left) was credited with rescuing the Millennium Dome project...

DJs Fatboy Slim (left) and his then wife Zoe Ball are wrapped up for winter as they walk away from Brighton pier. Zoe is pushing a pram while Mr Slim is carrying a small dog inside his jacket.

An exclusive of the couple for News of the World

Princess Margaret leaves King George VII hospital aided by a nurse.

An early "scoop" with my first digital SLR, the Canon D30.

Actress Martine McCutcheon signs a copy of her book in Harrods, London

A barely-in-focus photo of Martine McCutcheon

Notes on the photos:

Millennium Dome press conference 30th December 2000 – P-Y Gerbeau was credited with rescuing the flailing Millennium Dome project and appeared for a press conference on the roof of the structure alongside Deputy PM John Prescott, who couldn’t have been more miserable if he’d tried.

Zoe and Fat Boy Slim 29th December 2000 – I’d been sent to assist a News of the World reporter tasked with finding celebrities and asking them general knowledge questions to see how bright they were. While the reporter got his s**t together having had a bit too much fun in his hotel room the night before, I toddled off and got a fun spread of pictures of Zoe Ball and Norman Cook (aka Fatboy Slim) walking on Brighton Pier. When the reporter finally turned up and asked Zoe and Mr Slim to answer some questions, he was told to eff off and that was that. My images made a double page spread in NotW and Heat Magazine.

Princess Margaret leaving King George VII Hospital 20th January 2001 – I was sent along by News of the World to catch a photo of Princess Margaret leaving hospital. I knew two other NotW staffers were already there, but I also knew they were using film cameras. By shooting digital, I was able to file from the scene and my shots made the paper just because they arrived at the desk first.

Martine McCutcheon book signing at Harrods 25th November 2000 – My first digital SLR, a Canon D30, was pretty dreadful in low-light conditions. The autofocus just couldn’t keep up, so my shots from this press call are soft to say the least. I include this image to air my shame.

August 29, 2018 by Tim Gander

Goldfish Ate My Cat

How’s this for a blast from the past? A project from my college days, February 1991 to be precise, which involved mocking up a newspaper front page using pictures and stories I’d covered during the course. Well, two real stories at least; read carefully and you’ll notice some fake news too.

I stumbled across this while having an office clear-out. It’s pasted into the back of my first ever cuttings book, so it’s not been shredded or binned along with the eight-year-old bank statements, receipts, accounts and long-defunct business cards from long-defunct businesses.

The purpose of the exercise was to think about page layout and to get to grips with the newly-emerging technology of desktop publishing. In fact I recall this was done on something like a Mac 1 (or thereabouts). Looking at the caption for Norma Major’s photo you can tell I wasn’t all that impressed with the image quality available at the time.

The lead story about Don McCullin was clearly the one item I was taking seriously in this exercise, given the rather pretentious journalism I employed when writing it. But I still have a proper silver print of that photo I made at the time. It sits inside the cover of my signed copy of McCullin’s Unreasonable Behaviour.

Luckily no one came forward to claim the space shuttle prize and I’m afraid the competition closed in March 1991.

Scan of a newspaper design project made in 1991 at Stradbroke College, Sheffield featuring Don McCullin and Norma Major.

News front page cover design project, 1991.

in Archive / My News / Older Work / Personal Work 0 comments

December 15, 2017December 16, 2017 by Tim Gander

2017 In Review

In keeping with a tradition which stretches back oh, at least some years now, it’s time for me to review my year in pictures. I hope you enjoy the brief selection of photos in the gallery below.

Actually, what an incredible year it’s been! I’m not sure I’ve ever had such a busy year since I went freelance 19 years ago, so I’m looking forward to 2018 more in anticipation than trepidation.

January was a total whirlwind as the Faces of Routes project went from conception to launch in less than five weeks. The reaction from Frome people and beyond was stunning (and I don’t often use that word) and the Routes service was saved for another few years. In an ideal world, this service would be centrally funded, but for now it relies on donations and grants.

The Routes project largely came about because I was itching to do a personal project with a bigger purpose, but it also gave me the boot up the backside I needed to spur me on to undertake more personal projects generally. So it was good timing when a neighbour offered me his old medium format camera and lenses at a very reasonable price.

I’d been meddling with film again in a lighthearted way, but finding myself well-equipped with a solid film camera, and having dusted off my old 35mm film equipment, something was starting to take shape.

After a couple of false starts, out of some random whim that I can’t now remember having, I acquired a freezer drawer full of expired film of varying types and formats and the Saxonvale project was born. It doesn’t yet have its own gallery in my portfolio, but you can spot some examples in my Personal Favourites section.

So far Saxonvale has largely been an Instagram project, but I’ll add more to my website in time.

Through all this, the paid work has just kept coming; January turned out to be much busier than I would normally have expected. In fact that pattern repeated through the year, including August when my diary would normally have tumbleweed blowing across it.

Now it’s mid December and things are definitely winding down a bit for Christmas, but it’s been another good month. So I’ll leave you with some highlights from the year and take this opportunity to thank you all, clients and casual visitors alike, for all your support through 2017.

I wish everyone a merry Christmas, happy New Year and all the very best for 2018. Oh and this will be my last post this year, see you all in January!

Portrait of a young man, smiling to camera, wearing a hoodie.

The Faces of Routes project and exhibition helped save the service.

A young, black, male engineer works on a bus's electrical circuit for the IRTE Skills Challenge 2017.

2017 was the 3rd year I'd covered the IRTE Skills Challenge.

Toby Baudains-Bourne poses with his skateboard outside the Cheese and Grain in Frome, Somerset, UK.

Part of a series of portraits of young skateboarders shot on film.

A trailer tips a consignment of grapes into the juicer at a winery in West Germany.

I managed to get a brief holiday in Germany and saw grapes being squished.

Weed seed heads garland a locked mesh gate to the Saxonvale site.

From the Saxonvale Project.

A young couple sits amongst tall grass, looking across at a horse grazing illegally

From the Saxonvale Project.

The remains of a swivel chair base, one leg snapped off and missing.

From the Saxonvale Project.

A fire burns on the open Saxonvale site as a young man strides away, looking at his mobile phone

From the Saxonvale Project.

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August 31, 2017 by Tim Gander

Two Decades and a World Away

Members of the Welsh Guards carry Princess Diana's coffin

Yes, I was there too. Another press photographer who covered Diana’s funeral and because my words will be lost in the blizzard of articles and analysis on this the 20th anniversary of her death, I’ll point you towards this excellent article by Fleet Street photographer Brian Harris before offering a few brief thoughts of my own.

For myself, I was a lowly local news photographer at the time and was astonished to be assigned an official pass to cover the funeral from a position directly opposite the main door of Westminster Abbey.

Like Brian, I remember being hissed at by the crowd as I made my way to the position. I remember the weird atmosphere as people cheered the stars of music, TV and film as they arrived for the service. I also remember seeing the shot of the card on the coffin which just read “Mummy” and yes it was a cracking shot, but Brian’s was more graceful.

As for my effort, well it wasn’t the strongest image of the day, but I found myself focusing on the expressions of the pallbearers, members of the Welsh Guards who were clearly struggling to hold their emotions together. The shot summed up the occasion and emotions of the day in a fairly tight frame.

So considering it’s not a shot I had never wanted to have to take, I’ll live with it and leave it here as part of a much larger record of a sad day which changed all who were involved at least a little and for ever.

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December 20, 2016 by Tim Gander

2016, a personal review

Normally I’d post a “year in pictures” round-up just about now, but I’ve decided to do something a little different this time just because.

Instead I’m going to focus on the more off-beat, off-diary photos I’ve taken. You’ll have seen most of them, but not all, in various blog posts through the year, but it’s fun to pull them together into a single gallery to enjoy again.

So sit back with your cuppa and your mince pie and enjoy…

A red car, seen from above, is blurred as it drives along a dual carriageway. Its shape is split by the shadow of an unseen lighting pole which is cast diagonally across the road.

Taken while attending National Photography Symposium in Derby.

30/04/2016 32-year-old Victoria Venteo takes a cigarette break towards the end of her shift as a waitress at Bedales wine bar in Borough Market, Southwark, London, UK. Photo © Tim Gander 2016. All rights reserved.

Wine waitress Victoria takes a break at Borough Market, London.

Joe Gander is lit dramatically, standing looking to camera with an alleyway leading off behind him.

Flash test shoot with my son Joe.

Bad Rasta travels the country selling merchandise at carnivals. Pictured here at Frome Carnival, Somerset, UK.

Bad Rasta, carnival trader, poses, smiling to camera as part of my film test project.

Digitised photos from black and white film, Sept 2016. Portrait of Geoff Eastaff, aged 64 of Frome, who has had to live on benefits since 1980 when his now ex wife attacked him and left him with serious head injuries.

Geoff poses for my film test project.

Shot through a tinted window in the rain, St John's in Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada.

Closeup texture, dead tree.

Pentax S1a 35mm camera with Super-Takumar 55mm f/1.8 lens attached.

I'm hoping to shoot much more film in 2017.

The sun sets behind a large Canadian pine tree, Nova Scotia, Canada.

Happy Christmas!

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February 16, 2016March 9, 2016 by Tim Gander

Film vs Digital

This isn’t another article about whether film is better than digital. There are plenty of those out there and I’ve never read one which came to any kind of concrete conclusion. No, this is about the realisation that I’ve now been shooting digital for more than half my professional career. In fact I crossed the 50/50 threshold a couple of years ago and didn’t even realise it.

Let’s chart my film/digital timeline then. I started freelancing in 1988, went digital in November 2000, and pretty much committed myself to digital ever since.

With film I’d started with developing and printing black and white in the darkroom at the Bath Chronicle. When I became a staff photographer on The Portsmouth News I had to switch to colour, processing using a minilab in the office and having my work printed by darkroom technicians. Then with the march of progress, newspaper production got computerised and the photo department lost its print technicians.

Photographers then had to process their films in the usual way, but we then scanned the negatives on a Kodak scanner, captioned them on a Mac and stored the images on Zip drives, which were slow, unreliable and couldn’t store many photos. I remember the digital archive getting very quickly out of hand.

I left The News in 1998 before they went fully digital, but while I was there I did get to try a Canon EOS1 with a Kodak digital back at Wimbledon one year, so that really was my first experience with digital SLR photography. But digital SLRs back then ran to something like £15,000 just for the body, so I couldn’t afford one as a freelance.

At first I was shooting film and scanning using a portable Canon scanner and wiring pictures via my Nokia 6310 mobile phone connected to my Apple 1400c Powerbook. It was slow and unreliable to send data back then, but it mostly worked ok. I even got the odd scoop with that setup.

Exterior of Netherton House, Hampshire, for News of the World

My first digital news photo taken Nov 2000

Jakki Degg poses with movie clapper board

Early digital shoot to promote a diet

Then in 2000 the Canon D30 was released. A 3.4 megapixel SLR which could just about do a news job, but which cost a mere £1,600 for the body. It wasn’t really up to the task of fast news, but it was fine for features and objects that didn’t move, like the exterior of a country house I shot for a News of the World story. Thankfully my current digital SLRs are far better, far more responsive and the images produced are a world away from the early models and the price, while not cheap, is far more accessible.

I’m glad I started my career with processing film and printing in a darkroom. It taught me so much that you can’t learn if you start with digital. I still carry the lessons I learned back in the late 1980’s and it often helps me work faster by knowing what’s going to result from a particular set up even before I put the camera to my eye. I do sometimes use digital like a polaroid to check settings and lighting, but I’m usually pretty close to what I want before I even do that.

I’m keen to get back to shooting more film though. It does remind you of certain fundamentals and makes you work in a different way so I’m going to look for clients or projects which will allow me to get back to film once in a while.

Whether that will actually happen depends on many factors, time being a critical one, but I know the vast bulk of my work will be digital for the foreseeable future. As ever, watch this space because you’ll be the first to see if I shoot film for anything serious again.

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December 1, 2015 by Tim Gander

Cold, wet and Poldark

Filming for the TV series Poldark is due to start in Frome this week and since yesterday was an admin day (boo hiss paperwork) I took the opportunity to stretch my legs and take a couple of shots in the street where crews are currently at work making sure all signs of modern life are removed or obscured.

The weather was pretty dire with high winds and plenty of rain and I didn’t have a great deal of time to work up a broad selection of photos, but it got me thinking about all the times I’ve ventured out with my camera when the weather is bad – mostly in the past in order to get extreme weather photos for national newspapers.

I still enjoy the challenge of getting pictures in adverse conditions, even if I’m not venturing into the world’s extreme regions. Seeing how people interact and cope with the weather is often interesting in itself. Sometimes the weather is just a distraction, as in the Poldark pictures. Other times it becomes the focus of the story (the 2001 Trooping the Colour is a fine example). More often now the weather is the story, as when there is flooding or gale damage.

Here’s a quick gallery round-up of extreme (or sometimes just mildly difficult) weather photos I’ve done over the years, from Trooping the Colour to yesterday’s preparations for Poldark.

Please click to enlarge and scroll through the photos.

A TV security man stands in the dark of Gentle Street, Frome, at night illuminated by a floodlight.

It's Poldark, wet and quiet on Gentle Street, Frome

Carpenters and set builders at work in Frome's Gentle Street for the filming of Poldark.

Set-building in Gentle Street, Frome

A range Rover is driven at speed through flood water.

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March 24, 2015 by Tim Gander

My First Digital Photos

I’d like to thank commercial photographer Chris Pearsall for the inspiration for this week’s article when he posted his very first digital image to a photographers’ forum on Facebook.

My first digital SLR was a Canon D30, a 3.1 megapixel camera which I bought at the tail end of 2000 for about £1,600. It was a pretty terrible camera, but I was shooting a lot of news at the time and it saved me a lot of rushing to 1-hour processing labs to get my images ready for scanning and sending to the picture desk. The next model up, the rather more capable 1D was I think about £3,500 at the time and on the shift rates I was on at the time would have taken forever to pay off.

Its main drawback was the slow, and not very reliable focusing. I could have my finger jammed down on the shutter button, desperately trying to get it to lock focus and take the photo of some celebrity or other rushing from their front door to a waiting taxi. If I was lucky I’d get a photo of the back of the taxi as it pulled away.

On slower-moving people and static objects it was fine, but not perfect. It’s fair to say that digital cameras have come a long way since 2000.

The earliest image I can find is a rather dull exterior of a house. It was to accompany a non-story about a gameshow contestant.

A big house at a distance… yawn

Another story I covered using the D30 (I wasn’t using it for everything at this stage) was something of a struggle, it being a nighttime air crash near Aldershot. Focus was difficult and the image noise further softened the images. Nothing I took that night made the paper.

Late in December 2000 I covered a visit by the then Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott to the Millennium Dome before it closed and went on to become the O2 Arena. This shot of the director of the attraction, P Y Gerbeau, is a typical example of the struggles I had with that camera to get sensible colours and to get fill flash to work convincingly. I’m so glad things have improved since then, but it was interesting to go back to my very first CD of digital images. Another thing it showed me is just how much my photography has improved since then too!

firecrews examine the wreckage of an aircraft after it crashed into an industrial building near Aldershot.

It was a tragic accident on a dark, wet night and the D30 struggled to work reliably

P Y Gerbeau at the Millennium Dome, Greenwich, London

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October 29, 2013June 10, 2016 by Tim Gander

Storming Good Coverage

Newspapers love a good “bad weather” story, and the St Jude storm this week was a gift to editors who could fill their print and web pages with a broad mix of images from agencies, readers and possibly one or two “courtesy of the internet” accidentally-stolen shots too.

Thankfully, rumours that Sir Paul McCartney is to re-write Hey Jude and perform it live on the roof of Buckingham Palace to raise money for those who lost patio chairs in the storm have proved to be unfounded.

Unfortunately for you, the storm does give me the opportunity to regurgitate some crusty old newspaper cuttings from my early career when I was part of The Bath Chronicle’s Storm Watch team in 1990. Indeed, everyone talks about the 1987 storm, but the 1990 storm also brought down trees and caused umbrellas to be inverted. Looking at these old pics, I realise I wasn’t exactly lead photographer being sent to cover the full devastation, but it’s still fun seeing some odd little scraps of time again. Enjoy!

Shoppers in Bath city centre battle with wind and rain

Hold onto your hats, the storm's a-coming!

Geoffrey Hughes and Roy Hudd in Babes in the Wood, Theatre Royal, Bath

Geoffrey Hughes and Roy Hudd starring in Babes in the Wood bolster the stage door against the storm. The show was suspended during the storm, presumably due to the risk of falling trees. Or babes

Workmen deal with fallen trees after the storm

A tree is uprooted at The Royal Crescent, Bath.

A tree is uprooted at The Royal Crescent in Bath

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October 11, 2011September 5, 2014 by Tim Gander

Why wasn’t my Dad Vivian Maier!

Those of you who follow me on twitter (those of you who don’t, why don’t you?!) may have read my tweets over the past weekend that I am currently looking through a box full of old transparencies taken by my late father. Most appear to date from the very late 1950s and early 1960s, though not all are dated.

Of course I was hoping to stumble across a veritable Vivian Maier-style collection of emotive, historical images. Unfortunately for me, my Dad wasn’t the street-photographer type.

Many of the images were taken in Germany of the places my Mother and Father visited when making trips to see my maternal grandmother in Ludwigshafen am Rhein where she lived, but Dad always liked taking pictures of landscapes, old houses and castles. None of which change much even in 50 years.

I’m still working my way through the slides though. There are maybe a couple of hundred in all. Again, not exactly Maier proportions, but some have caught some interesting fashion styles and cars and I need to look at them all before deciding if there is anything worth scanning.

One of the main problems I’m finding is the deterioration of the slides. Some have fungi growing on them. With some the slide mounts have sprung open, and others have lost all colour except magenta. Bit of a mixed bag of problems really.

Just out of curiosity, I’m posting a small selection of them here. These aren’t proper scans and I’ve left them deliberately messy – let’s call them instagrams that took a little longer to develop.

With all these issues though, it makes you wonder what state our digital files will be in 50 years from now. One solar flair and perhaps all digital photography will be wiped! Hmm, if only I could control the Sun, then I could control the digital photography market! MWAHAHAHAHA!!!

*Tim has gone for a lie down and nurse will be along shortly with fresh medication.

View of Pultney Bridge and Empire Hotel, Winter 1961

Taken circa 1961, of the Empire Hotel and Pultney Bridge, Bath

Trees in a park. All the colour dyes apart from magenta have disappeared.

In those days you dressed smart for holiday.

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