Ken Sparrow Photography

My Photo History

I have been a photographer to varying degrees for most of my life. My parents had one of the original 120 roll-film Kodak box-brownie cameras when my brother and sister and I were growing up and I started with a simple folding 120 roll-film camera in my early teens. This led me into setting up a darkroom under our house to develop my films and to make basic contact prints.

Later years saw me with a second-hand Mamiya 35mm range-finder camera in the early 60s, then the purchase of a RICOH XR-1 35mm manual SLR camera around 1977 and subsequently the move to a Canon 35mm EOS 1000FN SLR around 1992 followed by the purchase of a pair of the more advanced Canon EOS 100 autofocus SLR film cameras in the mid 1990s. This period also saw me attending a TAFE course to learn more about dark-room processing and then setting up a fully fledged darkroom to  produce monochrome prints and enlargements of assorted sizes using a MEOPTA enlarger.    

 Then, in 2000, the digital era arrived. My first purchase was a compact Canon G1 Powershot 3Mp camera which cost around $1,200 from memory. The miniscule capacity 16Kb, 32Kb, 64Kb, 128Kb and 256Kb  CF cards cost hundreds of dollars!  Around this time Canon also brought out the Canon EOS D30 3.0 Mp Digital SLR which cost around $6,000 from memory. Slow as a wet week with a huge shutter lag but a dSLR nevertheless and it took beautiful photos, almost as if they had been taken on Fuji Velvia film as I recollect. However this feature did not carry over to the later models.

I purchased one of these second-hand in 2002 for around $3,000. This led to me attending another photography course at the Brisbane College of Photography and Art in 2002 to learn more about photography, studio techniques and the traditional processing of film. How quickly was film about to become obsolete!

From that point on the rate of change seems to have continuously increased. 

The first dSLR cameras had the smaller APS Sensor. My 3 Mp Canon EOS D30 was replaced by a 6Mp Canon EOS 10D a few years later (I skipped the 6Mp D60 model), then came the 8Mp 20D in 2004, the 8Mp 30D in 2006 and later a 10Mp 40D in 2007. The first Full Frame Canon EOS dSLR was the EOS 5D 12Mp which was released in 2005.  

The Canon 5D Mark II 21Mp came out in 2010 and this was followed by the Canon 5D Mk III 22Mp in 2012.

With my low light ballet photography taking up the lion's share of my photographic commitment from 2003 to 2012 and low noise, high ISO usability being my driving force, I was continually looking for improvements in low-light performance. Embracing the improvements in the emerging technology as soon as they were available was almost mandatory. Photographing ballet in the available light in the studio and in stage lighting for performance photography became much easier as the technology improved.

The objective was to be able to photograph at a wide aperture (f/2.8) with a shutter speed of 1/160 sec or faster (preferably 1/250 sec or more) at an ISO high enough that would allow the camera to attain these shutter speeds but trying to minimise the effects of High-ISO noise. This meant sticking to Canon full-frame cameras once the full-frame format became available and not being afraid to push the ISO up to 3200 and 6400 on a regular basis.   

When my photography at Queensland Ballet came to an end at the close of 2012 the pressure consequently eased as far as having to keep up with the latest in technology. The 5D and 40D cameras have been sold off and replaced with a  Canon 70D lighter weight APS kit and a lightweight Canon 200D walk-around camera that I have with me most of the time. Mobile phones in the sunlight are just too hard and too much guesswork (although the cameras in them have improved greatly in recent years).

However the Canon 5D Mk iii is still my camera of choice for the best possible results. My older Canon 5D Mk ii "prosumer" camera with a rather high shutter count of around 150,000 after three years of ballet work is now probably unsalable and remains as a backup or second camera. 

My darkroom kit - that had languished in storage for the past 15 years - has now been donated to Bond University. It was fortuitous to find a home for the many hundreds of dollars (thousands?) worth of developing and printing equipment that I had packed away when the digital era arrived. A chance contact with Ms Susie Ting, the Senior Teaching Fellow in the department of Advertising & Strategic Communications in the Faculty of Society and Design turned up that she was looking for an "old-fashioned darkroom" to include in the teaching of her students.   

As far as my photography goes, it will be interesting to see where my love of photography next takes me after my many years of involvement with Queensland Ballet and my stepping away from 15 years of involvement in the organisation of the Gold Coast Photographic Society. I now actually have some spare time again.

December 2019.