Having recently visited the USA for a family holiday, and having decided to shoot pictures on film with my Yashica rangefinder, I have been enjoying editing the resulting images. They are mostly street pictures influenced by a combination of my favourite American photographers - William Eggleston, Garry Winogrand, Joel Meyerowitz, Stephen Shore, Henry Wessel etc. They don't all include people. I took them over a period of 3 weeks in various locations from New Hampshire to New York City. Some are obviously urban, some very rural. Some are taken close to the subject, others from a distance. It would be hard to define an overall mood to the pictures - I was excited when I took them, mostly because I was thrilled to be using film again with all the attendant risks and uncertainty - but some of the images could be interpreted as ironic or quizzical interpretations of American culture. I have sequences of hats, umbrellas, empty and abandoned chairs, signs and other sets of objects. Simply throwing all the photographs together in a random order has produced some intriguing results. However, I have also enjoyed using more coherent strategies like those listed above.

Here, for example is a sequence of images connected by colour - in this case, red. When I used to shoot exclusively with Kodachrome 64 transparency film (now sadly unavailable) it was always the reds that seemed most vivid in the resulting slides. Perhaps I'm still subconsciously drawn to red when I make photographs, although it could also be argued that so are advertisers and shop window display artists and sign designers and others who create our visual landscape, precisely because red is so seductive, leaping out at you and grabbing your attention. Perhaps one of the most famous red photographs ever made is William Eggleston's fly's eye view of his friend's ceiling. As Eggleston himself observed:

Anyway, here are my red photographs, which I've decided to title 'Songs everybody knows':

This isn't the definitive set of images, just one of many potential edits. I love photography precisely because it offers this ongoing experience of meaning making long after the images themselves have been created. I hope it's one of the things I try to communicate to my students. Taking the photograph is just the start of a creative journey. It's definitely a feature of my Photopedagogy.

-- Jon Nicholls

In recent years I've used various Canon DSLRs and it's Canon cameras we have in school. I'm no expert when it comes to cameras so I don't know that much about the various pros and cons of particular models. I've never had the resources to buy Pro equipment so I've made do with more affordable models. To be honest, I'm very much an amateur when it comes to photography.

I have a colleague in school who is something of a camera collector. I suppose it was talking to her about the cameras she owns and uses that inspired me to look on eBay for old film cameras. I'd never owned a Rangefinder and so my first purchase was a 1970s Canonet 28. I enjoyed using it, replaced the light seals and should really have stopped there but I'd seen a couple of other cameras that looked fascinating. One of these was the Yashica Electro 35. After doing a bit of research I decided to bid on a black GTN, one of the later models which has a hot shoe. I was also keen to make sure that the seller provided an alternative battery to the now defunct original. In the end I paid £40 for mine and have been using it regularly ever since.

It's a brilliant street shooter. The f1.7 lens is fast and sharp. It's almost all auto with very little to get in the way. I select an appropriate aperture and set the focus to 10 feet. Most of the time I don't have time to use the big rangefinder window to check the focus. It's simply a matter of judging my distance form  the subject, raising the camera to my eye and clicking the silent shutter, hoping for the best. I love the sense of anticipation, waiting for the prints to be developed, wondering which of the photographs I think I've taken have worked.  For me, there's nothing quite like the thrill of shooting on the street. My favourite photographers are those American heroes of street photography from the seventies: Garry Winogrand and Joel Meyerowitz. As Meyerowitz describes so perfectly:

I'll never be able to afford a Leica M6, or even a Contax G2. I might one day treat myself to a Konika Hexar. Until then my beloved Yashica Electro 35 GTN will always be the camera I reach for when I feel the urge to head out into the crowd.