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About Hamish Reid Photography

About the Photography

Hamish Reid’s photography specializes in the familiar — local landscapes and buildings, people, everyday intimacies, household and workplace items — and the collision of the surreal and the familiar that’s always a part of life. The subjects range from urban and desert landscapes, through “people” shots and portraits, to lightscapes, architecture, and manipulated images.

Some images here date from the film era; most are digital. Some are from a 4×5 view camera, some from a variety of medium format film cameras; most are from DSLR’s and digital point-and-shoots; some are from my iPhone. And note: the dates mentioned on most images are approximate at best, and may vary by a year or two from reality. And a lot of the photos here are just snapshots taken to show family and friends what was going on in my life, so don’t get too hung up on quality and artiness, etc. — I gave up on just presenting the portfolio-worthy photos a few years ago, and especially now that I’ve folded the Pandemonia stuff into Hamish Reid photography, there’s a lot of stuff here that wouldn’t have gone in the earlier version.

All images on this site are copyright © Hamish Reid, Richmond, California, unless otherwise noted.

About Hamish Reid

Hamish Reid is a photographer and videographer based in Richmond, California. He is originally from both Britain and Australia, and has worked in both photography and software development professionally over the decades; he also holds a US private pilot certificate. For a memoir of how Hamish drifted into photography (he didn’t even own a camera until he was in his late twenties), read his Me and Photography article.

Hamish’s photos can also be seen on Instagram, where he is @jingletown, and his (intermittently-updated) Facebook page is @hamish.reid.photography. He also has a separate California And Nevada From The Side Of The Road Tumblr which is basically a place where a lot of the images that wouldn’t really fit here end up. His videos are featured and discussed on the Hamish Reid Video site, and are also usually up on his Youtube channel and / or his Vimeo channel (the latter focuses on the artier stuff at the moment). Hamish has also belatedly joined the image-sharing Fediverse as @hamish on the pixelfed.social Pixelfed instance.

About the Website

This website (Hamish Reid Photography, photography.hamishreid.com) is a subdomain of www.hamishreid.com, and has been through a number of iterations over the years. In reality, it started as a completely different site, Pandemonia (pandemonia.com), which has history, having started in the Paleolithic days of the web, before Netscape or IE or such conveniences as CSS or even HTML tables (I think I started it in 1993, certainly in the days of slow dial-up modems). I actually grabbed the hamishreid.com domain quite late, and used it for a more formal domain around the time I had a photo business (which, confusingly, used another domain name, i.e. not done in my name), so for a long while there have been two photography sites for my photos — HamishReid.com and Pandemonia, with the former as a formal portfolio showcase, the latter for more discursive work. This was never very smart and always caused confusion, and I’ve been trying to fold Pandemonia into Hamish Reid Photography (i.e. this site) for the last few months (as of late 2022). It’s almost up and running properly, but there’s still a fair bit more work to do to integrate things like Photolalia and Featured Images, etc. In other words, it’s all still a work in progress, and probably always will be, so if you don’t see an image you remember from a while back, or things look unfinished, try again in a month or two. Sorry about that…

There’s a sister Hamish Reid Video (video.hamishreid.com) site that attempts to do the same thing for my video work.

Just The FAQs

Questions real people have actually asked me in email or face to face, multiple times…

For longer answers to some of the FAQs below, take a look at my Me and Photography article).

Where are you from?

I live in California’s Bay Area, but I’m originally from both Britain (as it used to be) and Australia, with an accent that tends to be somewhere between those two poles.

What motivates your photography?

I’m tempted to say I have no motivation — I can’t not do it. It’s more of a calling than any sort of motivation. Having said that, I sometimes feel a burning desire to show the world what I see — I’m a glorified reporter, in other words. I certainly have no pretensions to art (I’m an engineer by trade and training, after all).

Do you have any formal training?

Almost none at all, and it certainly shows, sometimes painfully. I think where formal training would have helped most would have been in short-cutting my way to feeling at ease with the techniques, the processes, and the business (I did photography professionally for a while, and semi-professionally a bunch of years after that as well).  I look at a lot of my early work and think “meh — I could have done so much better if only I’d done a few courses”. Not from the subject matter or compositional side of things (I don’t think anyone’s ever needed to tell me what to take photos of, or to go out there and find myself photographically (urgh)), but from a more prosaic point of view: lighting, colour balance, focus trade-offs, self-promotion, film choices — technical things like that.

Live and learn, I guess.

Have you had any shows?

I’ve done a bunch of small-scale local solo shows over the years, but nothing particularly grand or ground-breaking. I don’t fit well into either the art side of things or the explicitly socially-committed side of the photography world, and I’m not well plugged into the photography world in general, so I have low expectations here.

Why are there so few “people” images here?

I’ve done literally thousands of “people” photos over the years, but very few of them are up here, even though many of the best were done with signed formal releases. Why so (comparatively) few, then? Mostly because I have scruples about showing recognisable people up here; my article “Nakeds” here sort of discusses this in relation to my “nakeds” (they’re not nudes, that’s for sure), but it’s even true for my attitude towards non-naked people shots. I may slowly start easing up on the scruples; we shall see.

Do you have your own studio?

Until a few years ago I had a studio in the Jingletown district of Oakland for maybe fifteen years; before that I had a more makeshift one in Berkeley. I had to leave all that behind when I decided the inevitable overnight 50% rent rise reflected an Oakland I no longer recognized…. I miss having my own studio, for sure, but I’m not likely to try to build another one.

What sort of cameras do you use?

Nowadays, mostly my big Nikons, my Sony RX100 VII point and shoot, or my iPhone. Back in the film era, I used to use a Sinar A 4×5 view camera, a variety of medium format gear (especially my indestructible Pentax 67), and a Nikon FM2n 35mm camera. My first ever camera was a Pentax Super-A 35mm SLR. Lenses? On all of the different cameras and formats where I could change lenses, I’ve always had 28mm, 50mm, and 100mm 35mm-equivalent lenses (or close enough, anyway). I don’t have any super-wide or fisheye lenses, nor anything longer than 200mm. And, yes, all my lenses are zooms nowadays, and why not?

Do you get irritated at being asked about your cameras?

I know that a lot of serious photographers think these sorts of questions are either insulting or miss the point, but I think it’s those photographers who miss the point.

When someone asks me what sort of camera or lenses I use, I think they’re really asking what sort of gear can get the shots I get without too much hassle (and, by extension, whether they have the sort of gear that can get shots like that). Which usually leads me to a discussion about the different types of camera (iPhone, point-and-shoot, DSLR, etc.) and their trade-offs, rather than specifics, which (again) is usually what they’re really asking. They know they can’t get that long-lens shot with a cheap iPhone  —  but they typically don’t know what camera and / or lens can get that shot.

So I’m always fine with being asked.

What’s your favourite camera?

Oh, that’s easy — nowadays it’s my iPhone, by a long way, followed (for general purpose use) by the RX100. In the film era, it was my Pentax 67.

Do you have any recommendations for a camera?

Not really. All I’ll say here is that (with some obvious subject-matter exceptions) if you can’t learn to take good photos on an iPhone (or Android equivalent), you’re probably not going to do well with a high-end Nikon or Canon….

Do you get nostalgic for the film era?

Not at all. See my Going Against The Grain: Film As Lifestyle Accessory for some of the details (the title alone probably says all that needs to be said anyway).

Do you use autofocus / auto metering / program mode / etc.?

Yep. All that and more… when it helps. Which is most of the time. Otherwise, having used manual-everything cameras for years before the revolution, I’m quite capable of reverting to manual. But why? My Nikon’s often better than me at quick-paced decisions in bad light or difficult situations… (and I like the way my iPhone gives me almost no choices at all).

Why don’t you do nice landscapes?

I do!!!! Well, I think they’re nice. But if you want good  beautiful landscapes (and much else besides), done properly, check out the work my UK friends Tony and Pam Bamford do (sadly, their website is out of commission at the moment…). I’ve been friends with both of them since my London days, and have done several photo trips with them here — they know what they’re doing, and how to do it, and their landscapes put mine to shame.

Do You Use Photoshop To Manipulate Your Images?

If you mean more than just playing with the levels, or simple cropping, the answer is yes, of course I do. There’s even a whole gallery here somewhere devoted to it! But I almost never do it for other purposes or on my  “straight” reporting images (landscapes, architecture, or people) — I’m one of those people who actually likes having electricity poles and wires in his images,  blemishes on his human subjects, or gratuitous human activity marring pristine scenes (you might have noticed). And I like those bland grey skies! But I do sometimes resort to de-saturating images a bit — sometimes that California landscape look just looks, well, a little unbelievable to anyone who hasn’t lived here a while.

Do you belong to a photo club or do photo competitions?

No, I’ve never belonged to a club or done that sort of thing (competitions, etc.) — it’s really not my cup of tea. Actually, that’s not quite true — I was a member of The Camera Club in London for a few years when I lived there (and when it was just off Leicester Square), but that was almost entirely for the convenient darkroom rentals; the only time I entered a competition there was a comically-humiliating episode for me).