Feeling very motivated. Making coffee still in my sleeping bag, about and hour before dawn, Dartmoor, mid-winter.
I thought it about time I put a bit about me on my website, who I am, what I do, what I’ve done that’s fit to print and what motivates me…why I do it. So here goes.
My twin passions are the marine environment and photography. I’ve been a diver for a long time. I started out a thousand years or so back as an army diver in the British army, however after far too long grovelling around in freezing cold black water in the middle of the night I finally accepted that this wasn’t going to bring me the lifestyle that watching every episode of The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau had led me to expect. So at 19 I ended up in Africa, Mombasa to be precise, more by accident than design. I spent a couple of seasons there working on the wreck of the Santo Antonio de Tanna a 17th Century Portuguese shipwreck, then a short spell as a ship’s diver on an ocean going salvage tug, but what Kenya did mostly was rekindle my passion for wildlife and wild places.
I’ve always loved wild places. Spitzbergen, Svalbard. Wonder why I’ve a bad back now?
Returning to the UK and to university I eventually ended up with a masters degree – they were obviously keen to get rid of me – and so began a 20-odd year career participating in and running biological diving surveys. My photography career has grown in parallel to my marine biological work. Initially because pictures were required to illustrate reports and well…someone had to take them. My first camera was not a land camera but an underwater one, an ancient Nikonos III. Almost completely mechanical and fully manual, I spent many hours lost in concentration under an old wooden pier, gradually improving my skills through trial and error. Mostly error actually. The skills learned there did serve me well though. With no automation, no light meter and no automatic flash control you were forced to learn the fundamental laws of light and optics and the interaction with water. The turbid waters of the Clyde Estuary were not very forgiving, so one had to pay attention to these laws if you wanted to get any usable images at all out of a 36 exposure film roll.
Currently I am based in Exeter, south Devon, England, living on a rather old wooden trawler converted to sail (a ‘work in progress’). I split my time between photography, running workshops and lecturing and marine environmental survey. That is when not head down in the bilges of my boat cursing, effecting some repair, or escaping on to Dartmoor.
An old wooden boat is rather like the Forth Road Bridge. Painting and repairs never end.
Nowadays, where Photoshop is not just a software package but a verb, ‘he/she’s been Photoshopped‘, the concept that ‘the camera never lies‘ is one few of us still believe. But images are still powerful, and they still have the ability to change things. In a World now flooded with images it is unlikely a single image will ever have the same power to change the course of events as Nick Ut’s picture of Phan Thi Kim Phuc. Nevertheless we live in a image-based World and images can still change public perception and attitude to social and environmental issues in a way that dry, dusty reports never will. So for me taking pictures is, of course, about creating beautiful images, and it’s about the satisfaction of creating technically difficult or hard to get images; but the greatest satisfaction comes from creating images that inform or change peoples attitudes however slightly.
You can find me on Google+ , Facebook and LinkedIn. Most of my stock photography images are available at http://colinmunro.photoshelter.com. This can also be searched directly from my main website www.colinmunrophotography.com where you will also be able to buy fine art prints of my work and find information on photography training courses I run.
Back to my main website