Dave Sones

About: I’ve been interested in all aspects of photography since the age of 13, when I had my first film camera and turned the cupboard under the stairs into a darkroom (I’m surprised the fumes didn’t kill me in such a small enclosed space). Since then, I’ve been through a succession of both film and digital cameras and finally got ‘serious’ in 2015 when I joined a club. I learned so much from my years there, including how not to hate competition judges. I also benefitted enormously from the advice given to me by a friend and mentor who was a brilliant ex-RAF photographer who’d seen and done it all.


Interests: As a complete contrast to photography, I took up beekeeping a few years ago. These fascinating little creatures are almost as complex as photographic theory and have the added benefit of providing copious amounts of honey each year.


History: My work life always involved me in cutting edge technologies and when the World Wide Web arrived in the early 90’s I found myself totally immersed in the development of one of the first large-scale business-to-business web sales platforms. Jeff Bezos was around at the same time and did quite well with a similar idea. My experiences with the Internet have led me to become something of an evangelist for Open Source photography applications, which unlike some rather costly commercial software are completely free and capable of doing a great job for post-processing and image manipulation.

What Dave has to say: As someone with a very low boredom threshold, photography has managed to hold my interest and fascination for many years now. It’s a vast subject that you can never stop learning about; never stop trying improve you work; never exhaust the possibilities. Henri Cartier-Bresson is famously credited with the saying, “Your First 10,000 photos are your worst”. I don’t think I’ve reached that number yet, so there’s hope for me still.