Picture This

Member and amateur photographer David Runacres explains his enthusiasm for capturing the world around him, often in black-and-white.

I made the mistake for a while of collecting cameras, instead of focusing on the photography. I have 25 [camera] bodies and about 250 lenses.

When we go away, my wife tells me I spend more time agonizing over which camera I’m going to take than which flight we end up on. As long as you have a camera that’s good enough, it’s the photography that matters.

I’m not very good at approaching people in the street and photographing them, so I do tend to take pictures of places and things. But I try and look at them in a way that people wouldn’t normally look at them.

I take fewer photographs now and think more about them. I want to get it right first time and not be like everyone else and say, “Well, I can fix it later on.” In my opinion, what comes out of the camera should be the end product.

For a lot of people, film has become a snob thing. It’s like people arguing between an LP and a CD. If you like perfection, then go for a CD. But if you’re after something that actually has a personality—and that includes flaws—then go for an analog way of doing something. Negative film is fantastically broad in the range of light and dark it can record. Also, the way it handles color is subtly different, almost like an oil painting versus a photograph.

I don’t actually show the photos to that many people. I have a small following on Fickr, but I do it for my own pleasure. I have 35,000 pictures on my computer and I can almost tell you the story of each one. It’s the last 30 years of my life. It’s a very good way to remember stuff.

My mother passed away not long ago, and I really kicked myself that I hadn’t taken a photo of her for at least 20 years. So I’ve made up for that with my father…because I don’t want to not have that record. The same goes for my dog.

I tend to go on holiday to places I know will be good to photograph. I love going to Europe and avoiding the tourist places. Going around Paris with a Hasselblad and black-and-white film is just magical. I have a whole series of photos of people in cafés and at café windows. That’s what I look for, stuff a tourist probably wouldn’t. Most weekends, I go to random places in Tokyo. I found the old gate of Haneda Airport the other day. You can head out of the station anywhere and there’s
interesting stuff.

I wanted to be a professional photographer, but then I realized that in business I’m better at what I do. So it was better that I was successful at that in order to fund [the photography]. I have had some of my work paid for, which is incredibly satisfying.

I’m not naturally a patient person, but I’ve learned patience [through photography]. I can’t imagine anything else that could take as much of my attention and passion as this does.

As told to INTOUCH’s Nick Jones.
Image: Enrique Balducci