For more than 35 years I have photographed everything using anything. My first real camera I won in a drawing competition in 1967. The arrangers of this contest were greatly surprised realising that the winning drawing was made by a boy of only 15.

The camera was a 2 eyed Zeiss Ikon 6x6, the upper eye was used for finding and focusing and it had just 3 settings: Distance, aperture and time. The exposure measurements were done using a separate measuring system - and when the film was rolled to the next shot, one had to look for the next picture number in a small red window on the back of the camera.

It was a fantastic camera with a fine lens making extremely sharp photos. When I compare the old negatives with new ones taken with a modern 6x6 camera then the only difference is on behalf of the development within the film technology.

To the right: Taking a photograph (1970).

Below: My first repro camera was 16 feet long, made of mahogany and had a negative format of 50 x 60 cm (1974).

Above: In nature with a 6x6 camera and a tele lens - loading a new film (1977)

To the left: Portrait photo, taken with an Agfa diffusion process called Copy Color (1979).

For 30 years I have now lived within the fields of commercial photography & graphic design having had my own graphic/photographic studio with employees and apprentices. I experienced the development from the time when texts were still set with leaden types and drawings and photos were etched into zinc plates to make clichés for printing.

The leap has been a giant one and it has been very exciting to be part of this fantastic progressing branch which went digital over very few years. I invested in modern computer technology ­ initially installing some big phototypesetting machines ­ these were, however, quickly replaced with Apple Macintosh computers.

When the World Wide Web was born I immediately grabbed the idea and went straight to designing web sites. As a result I now have superb expertise within electronic publishing on the Internet ­ and of course digital photography as a natural follower.

It always was my hobby to photograph the beautiful scenery of nature and I have looked up all kinds of interesting places and described them photographically. All through the years this has developed into a giant stock of photos of nature, people and places. I have never counted them all, but I guess my files hold around 100,000 photos.

For some years now I have planned to publish all these photos in a huge stock on the Internet. So in the course of the next years I will do that. I have been photographing digitally for the last 9 years and I will start with these shots ­ but soon I will scan pics from my files of diapositives (slides) and ­negatives (and doing a bit every week for about 8-10 years that will be done!).

And I will of course go on taking a lot of new and fresh photos and put them in the stock as well.

My best regards
Niels Riis Ebbesen
Denmark