DAVID ARNOTT'S PHOTO SITE

		David Arnott Born in the North of England in 1943, I studied languages and traveled in Europe, Asia and North America. I have done sculpture, walked in the hills, played a drum, practised meditation, written on Buddhism and society and been active in the peace and human rights movement. I began to specialise on the human rights situation in Burma in 1987 and from the early ‘90s until the present, continued to travel but spent most time working on Burma in the UN cities of New York and Geneva. My principal Burma activity at the moment is as Librarian of the Online Burma/Myanmar Library. Photography I have been taking photographs from the late ‘70s - at the beginning mostly B&W and, from the mid ‘80s, mainly colour. All in 35mm. In New York in the early ‘90s I acquired a macro lens and recorded New York textures - largely walls. My interest in walls continues, with the addition of other subjects such as tree bark, rubbish bins and, occasionally, people and landscapes. Though, as you will see from this site, I do take photos of subjects generally recognized as beautiful – clouds, reflections, mountains etc. -- I prefer subjects considered to be ugly or banal – valorising the everyday.
Cameras, lenses etc. My main camera at the moment is a Nikon F-100. I use a Nikkor AF 35-70mm 2.8 zoom an AF Micro Nikkor 60mm 2.8 lens, sometimes with Kenko extension tubes for macro work and a 28mm 2.8 wide-angle. I also have a Nikon FM-2 and a little Olympus Mju–II. Between the late ‘70s and early ‘80s I used a Topcon 35mm camera, and then a Pentax K1000. For some shots in the early ‘80s I have forgotten which of these cameras I used. From the early ‘90s I used a Bogen 3221 tripod with horizontal arm, replaced in 2003 with a Gitzo Explorer tripod via a Manfrotto micropositioning plate for ease of macro focussing. Films In the early ‘90s I mainly used Kodachrome 64 and for the past year or so, Fuji Velvia (50 and 100) with Ilford HP5 for the occasional B&W. I print out at 45x30 cm and 75x50cm. Scanning Since I use professional photo labs (chemical and digital) for my print-outs, I have not sought absolute perfection with the scans (from slides and negatives on an Epson Perfection 2450 Photo flatbed scanner). For most images, I have not made any adjustment in Photoshop. For some, I have played with the brightness and contrast. This website I chose the images on this site either for their quality as documents (historical, personal, political, social, architectural etc.) or for their photographic quality, or both. The 3-level hierarchy - Galleries, Subjects and Images -- and the database software (MySQL/php) -- allow me to handle a lot of images with minimal difficulty. A gesture is made in the direction of the Dublin Core metadata elements. Links and Library The Links are to other places on the Internet I like or which contain useful information. The Library is for documents written by me or others I have uploaded to the site