Peter Rand

Peter has been taking photographs for over 50 years, starting with his Father's camera. His first personal camera was one of the earliest Kodak Instamatic cameras, but a few years later he was given a 35mm Minolta rangefinder camera which served him well during his senior school years where he had exhibitions and started to get serious about photography. A friend had a darkroom at home and this enabled Peter to learn the mysteries of developing and printing his own work.

After school Peter studied photography at the Ealing School of Photography, at that time the pre-eminent college for professional photography. Following graduation he joined Tony Stone Studios, one of the largest studios in the country, doing stock photography using large format 10'x8" cameras.

Peter's career then went in a different direction and he left full time photography but still took photographs on a semi-professional basis, mostly doing portraiture and the occasional wedding, or motor sport freelancing for Autosport and Motoring News. Aviation is another long term interest (Peter is a qualified pilot) and he won the Royal Aero Club's photographic competition in 2001 including winning the Red Arrows section the same year.

Throughout Peter's whole photographic career his main interest has been landscape photography and a desire to try and interpret the beauty of the landscape. He is fortunate that he has travelled to many beautiful countries but he particularly likes the landscape of the United Kingdom as well as Iceland, Norway, New Zealand, and the national parks of the USA, all countries featured in the gallery sections.

He has used various cameras over his career, notably Nikon for 35mm and subsequently digital and currently uses the Nikon D300 and D7200. As mentioned elsewhere he is reverting back to film, primarily for his landscape work, as he still owns Mamiya 330f and RZ67 roll film cameras, and a Toyo 5x4 large format camera, all of which were gathering dust and virtually unused for the past 10 years. Nearly half the images in the galleries were taken using these latter film cameras.