My maths teacher when I was 11, Mr Jiwanji, had a sign on his classroom’s wall. It read: “I want to know maths because I can. I want to know why and how.” That simple ethos – of learning why things exist and learning it for its own sake – came to mind...

Here’s a photograph I took recently of a burnt-out motorcycle. I made the picture on a Nikon D40 on a 50mm Nikkor lens and deliberately blurred the background by setting an aperture of f1.8. At my computer, I converted it to black and white in the...

I love Photoshop – but its sister package, Adobe Photoshop Lightroom, doesn’t win my affections. It is a perfectly powerful application for the cataloguing photographs and processing Raw files. It does a good job. But it just isn’t as well-designed as...

If you want a Nikon zoom lens that’s light and covers a huge zoom range, the Nikon 18-200mm F3.5-5.6G IF-ED AF-S VR DX is a fantastic piece of kit. It’s an easy to carry one-size-fits-all lens for holidays and other trips. Of course, it’s true that a...

Digital cameras all have exposure meters built in, but if you using an old, very manual camera, you’ll need a dedicated exposure meter. Here’s my tip: buy one from the German company Gossen. I tried the budget-priced Sekonic L-208 and L-308 meters at...