Experiments in Light

My name’s Andy Lightfoot. I’m British, but I live in Japan. I’ve been taking photos since childhood, but until recently, with very little technical know-how and poor equipment.

I travel a lot, both in Japan and Europe, and am never without a Nikon DSLR to capture it all. Aside from travel photography, I’m also attracted to the abstract, and constantly find things around to home in on: I love the magic in transforming the mundane into objects of art and beauty.

I’m from the artistic, anarchistic side of photography, meaning that the composition and the act of capture is of much greater importance to me than the gear or the software.

Not that I’m not interested in maximising image quality, and I’m always ready to learn new techniques, it’s just that there’s no way I’m ever going to spend vast amounts of cash on bulky pro lenses and ponder for hours in front of the computer over one tiny imperfection.

Digital has liberated the pursuit, taken it from the hands of a small clique and thrown the doors wide open. We don’t need any outdated rules or disparaging comments (“real photographers shoot RAW and only use Manual”), anyone can enjoy the hobby, the possibilities are endless, and the only measure of success is being happy with the images you take.

So what’s the purpose of this blog? Well, to select one of my photos every day, and present it with a brief story concerning the conditions in which it was taken.

Yes, I’m too much of a coward to force myself to actually take a new photo each day, but I’ll be throwing new images in as and when I take them, together with ‘Instant Images’ from time to time, spontaneous creations on the iPhone when no DSLR was handy.

In the future I hope to start several other mini projects of a more thematic variety (here I’m reminded of a bloke who has a website dedicated to photos of Japanese overhead telegraphic and electrical wire entanglements).

Oh, and of course, in flagrant contradiction to the artistic philosophy espoused above, I want to funnel you all over to my gallery and online store at www.lightfootphotos.com in the vain hope that you might actually buy a print or order a digital license…

For the gearheads out there, I currently use a Nikon D7000 with a bunch of non-professional lenses (although some images presented on this blog were taken with the earlier D90 and D50).

I use Aperture 3 with various Nik Software plug-ins for post-processing, and Photomatix for the occasional HDR thingy.

My idiosyncrasies: I hate flash and tripods and almost never use either, I always keep a circular polariser on my main lens, and I think RAW is probably a waste of time.

See, told you I was an anarchist!

And that’s that…

Want to contact me? Perhaps you want to chat about art, offer me huge sums of money for my pictures, or become my groupie : just send an email here.