By way of introduction - part one

Back from China – my inaugural trip with a digital camera – and I’ve decided to launch a blog.

The opening picture is of my father’s Zeiss Ikon, bought in the early 1950s. It’s the first camera I can remember. For the era it was a fine piece of technology. I used it for awhile in the 1970s and it now sits on a shelf at home.

Although never particularly interested in the technology of photography, I have been curious about composition. When in British television, I was given a basic film course (“Just in case something happens to the cameraman.”). I've been privileged to work with some fine cameramen and they were men in those days. They taught me – not always successfully as you’ll see below – something about framing.

Anyway, this blog will be mainly for friends who generously tolerate my frailties. I’ll start with a few shots from past trips, often assignments. I won’t bore you with all the travels, just a few with particular memories. Remember that, until now, I shot with film and my pictures have been scanned, so the quality is often not good.

As a young reporter in England in the 1970s, the Soviet Union was my first foreign assignment. On a cold, slushy March day, here’s my first sight of a grey Red Square. Not a great picture, but – boy! – was I excited.

A few thousand kilometres to the southeast, this is Kislovodsk in the Caucasus. Its most famous native is the Russian writer and dissident, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. I like the shot because there’s a timelessness.

Work allowed me to explore my own country and at someone else’s expense. Here I am in the 1980s at an encampment outside Fort Simpson in Canada’s Northwest Territories.

This shot – better than I deserved – is of a plane taking off on the Mackenzie River.

A year or two later, I produced a documentary on Baffin Island. Colder than Red Square.

We were north of the Arctic Circle in December with only a couple of hours of daylight. For someone who’s always preferred living downtown in places like London and Toronto, it all came a bit of a shock, especially after riding hours on a snowmobile to get to a filming location.

When Albania was the North Korea of Europe – the most isolated and repressive country west of the Urals – somehow I managed to get in. They weren’t prepared to admit a cameraman, so I was forced to use Albanian TV. But I still had a scoop.

I pose beneath “Mother Albania’, at the base of which lay the late Enver Hoxha, the Stalin of the little Balkan state. It’s perhaps the only time in my adult life I’ve been without a beard. I’d heard unsettling tales of foreigners with beards being forcibly shaved at the frontier, so took pre-emptive action. I never discovered whether I had really needed to.

Long after Stalin was repudiated nearly elsewhere in the Communist bloc, in Albania he was still honoured with statues, street names and shoddy textile factories. I gather that this statue is now hidden – along with Lenin – behind the country’s national art gallery.

On a broiling August day, here’s Tirana’s main drag – the Boulevard of the Nation’s Martyrs. This is one of the few stoplights I spotted, but, as you can see, there wasn’t much traffic to stop.

A number of assignments took me to Israel. Below, if memory’s correct, I’m talking to the camera with some co-operative camels in the background.

At the end of a long, sweaty day, I have a brief vacation in the Dead Sea.

I met this donkey in the old city of Jerusalem and preferred him black & white.

A couple of times, I was privileged to interview Sir Edmund Hillary who, with Tenzing Sherpa, first summited Everest. I’m no climber and certainly don’t have the physique, desire or courage to get to 29,000 feet, but did want to see the mountain. In 1992, I spent some weeks following Sir Edmund’s 1953 route up to Everest Base Camp. I have an entire album of pictures; these are just two.

One of our porters en route.

And me, breathing heavily at 18,200 feet, with Everest behind (and well above).

Finally in this post, a return to Albania. In the 1990s, I was back twice, once to teach journalism as the country underwent traumatic change in the post-communist years. Another trip was to visit friends and see more of what had been Europe’s least-known country.

Albania’s long been a land of smokers.

They’re also fond of raki – the national spirit – often homemade. After roasting a sheep on the battlements of a 19th century fort, here I am promoting Albanian-Canadian friendship with the local policeman.