About Andy...

Early beginnings

I first started serious photography in 1975, albeit in a very minor way. I was 13 years old and I had a Kodak Instamatic 133 Camera which was, as far as I was concerned, the best camera on the planet. Or, rather, the best I could afford. Armed with this and several Kodachrome 64 cartridges, I visited Austria and fell in love with the mountains. My photographs were humble, but the compositions weren't bad. My eye was untrained, but I knew beauty when I saw it and did my best to capture it.

35mm film

By the time 1983 arrived, I had upgraded to an Olympus Trip 35 and toured the UK Lake District and the Scottish Highlands, taking many photographs of those fantastic places. To be honest, I don't think my photography had improved at all but I was in love with the scenery and that is a love that has never left me.

During the 1980s many changes took place in my life. I married, raised a family, got a job in IT and photography slipped into the background. After all, it was expensive and needed time and money, both of which I had very little to spare. But as the children grew up and I progressed up the corporate ladder I was able to revisit my love of photography and the places I loved.

Digital arrives!

In 2003, Canon released a game changing digital SLR, the EOS 300D. By today's standards it is under specified and expensive, but in 2003 it was the first affordable digital slr. I sold all of my Pentax SLR kit to get one and slowly added several landscape oriented prime lenses. In 2004 I revisited the Lake District and, finally, had the equipment to capture the images I had dreamed of making. I had studied the images made by Charlie Waite, Joe Cornish and Peter Watson and so had a better understanding of composition and technique. Some of the images from that visit are here on this site. Some even won minor awards.

At that time I was shooting RAW images and doing all the 'development' using self written software. I had spent all I could afford on the 300D and software such as Photoshop was too expensive for me. It was, at that time (in my opinion) not particulartly good at RAW development and I felt my software yielded better results. Thankfully, Adobe and others soon caught up and surpassed what I could do. They had teams of developers. I was on my own, trying to hold down a full time job and produce the software in my spare time. Nowadays, I use DXO Objects and Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop to do my image processing.

The fell walking photographer...

In 2008 I made another visit to the Lake District, this time with the idea of climbing the mountains (or, fell walking, as we call it on the UK) and getting images from better viewpoints than just the valley floors. But I realised that I was getting older and my knees, in particular, didn't appreciate the weight of digital SLRs and lenses, on top of the walking gear necessary for high level walking.

At that time, there was no alternative but to do the best I could but I was not able to carry as wide a range of lenses as I would have liked. But the camera industry was moving forward and soon digital mirrorless compact systems appeared - lightweight cameras with decent sized digital sensors and interchangeable lenses! This was just what I needed - now my entire kit weighs less than some of my Canon lenses! And, according to DXO tests, the equipment I now carry is the best I have ever had.

In 2015 I finally got out of IT and am now pursuing photography as both a hobby and a source of revenue. This site contains my favourite images and will expand as I add new images to my portfolio. I hope you enjoy them as much as I enjoyed creating them.

Further images can be seen at my other websites:

www.andybellphotography.com
www.theuklakedistrict.com

Andy