The Sunday interview: 5 questions for Cedric

Today I will present Cedric the author of I May Be Wrong. Cedric is an amateur photographer from Scotland.

1. Why photography?
When I was a kid, my parents had given me a film camera that they weren't using anymore, but I really struggled finishing rolls of film. At the time it was fairly expensive (especially for a kid) and so slow that I usually lost interest in the photos before they were processed. That just wasn't for me.

But, like most of my hobbies, photography restarted by accident. In 2003, a friend of mine came to visit me in Scotland and brought his brand new Canon 300D with him (the silver one). I thought it was super cool and got interested in DSLRs. I had played with digital cameras since 1997 (a Kodak at the time), but the quality was pretty low so what you could do with them was fairly limited (it was a real point and shoot with very little creative input, no zoom, no technical control).

I hadn't done any serious photography before and didn't understand the basic principles (aperture, DoF, sensitivity, composition). But I decided I wanted to take photos for some reason.

I bought a Canon 350D and absolutely loved it. That poor camera was rated for 15,000 clicks at the time and mine has gone way above 100,000 and still going. It has been all over the place with me as I was carrying it with me absolutely everywhere in my backpack. I have moved on from it now for larger cameras, but I still have it and it's in perfect working condition.

2. What is your favourite gear? (camera, lens)
Historically, the Canon 350D + grip + Canon 17-55IS (for general use) or Sigma 10-20mm (for landscapes). These are the combinations I have used most in my life for over 10 years.

I bought a Canon 5D in 2007 for a friend's wedding and the full frame sensor was a revelation. I didn't have a good lens for landscapes for it though (24mm was too long) so I continued to use the 350D for that. I used the 5D for street and wedding photography. The only issue I had with the 5D was the absence of sensor cleaning (Canon didn't have the technology at the time) that forced me to clean the sensor with alcohol every week or so. A real pain.

I now love my 6D (bought last year, even though when it came out I considered it a toy camera compared to the 5D) and my 1DX (bought this year because I could and I have always dreamed of one). They're much better quality, but very cumbersome (all my cameras have a grip because I have large hands and without it, even 5Ds and 6Ds are not comfortable to hold with my pinky always moving below the camera and doing a lot of painful heavy lifting). I use the Canon 50mm 1.4 and Canon 24-105ISL (bought with the 5D in 2007) with them. So, total weight close to 3kg at the end of the arm.

For everyday activities, I use a Sony RX100III bought for next to nothing on ebay last year because it was partly broken. Very good wee camera for easy conditions, and discreet.

3. What are your favourite subjects to photograph?
I'm a landscape photographer first. That's what I was interested in when I started all those years ago. People were of no interest to me, street was boring, studio was too expensive, wedding is too time-consuming, birds and animals are interesting but require insane hardware to do it well (I tried it with a Canon 100-400ISL + 2x extender), and documentary was just too much involvement.

I was living in Northern Scotland at the time, and it allowed me to explore the place. I'd get up super early, and either head to the beach to take photos at sunrise, or drive to the West coast to see the wilderness and take photos at sunset. I used to go round with my old ex-army Land Rover 90 after I got stuck in the snow with my everyday car. I now live about 45 minutes drive from the sea and I miss being able to just go there in the morning.

In the last 7 years, I picked up an interest in astronomy I had when I was a kid and started astrophotography. As usual, I went overboard in my hobby and now have 2 observatories in Southern Spain and one at home. Strangely, astrophotography is the reason I picked up normal photography after a few years of hiatus: bad weather last year in Southern Spain made it impossible to use telescopes for large parts of the winter, so I was out of a creative hobby. I remembered that I hadn't used my cameras for many years, and started again.

I'd absolutely love to do documentary photography. I find that photography is a great way to explore an idea, situation, or context. I tried a couple of times in the past (fishermen in the North Sea, and farmers in France), and loved it. I didn't go very far because I didn't have an easy way in, so the projects stalled.

4. Can you name a few of your favourite photographers? I don't really have a favourite photographer. I tend not to idolise people and even though I might like what some do, I don't consider them my favourite in general.

I tend to be interested in specific works, rather than in photographers and artists. I'm more interested in some painters, especially Hopper for the colours and themes of his paintings, and Vermeer for the light and technique. But I'm ignorant of art in general, so my appreciation is on the surface.

I can name a few that I have really liked over the years: David LaChapelle (his surreal, oversaturated, Las Vegas series in the early 2000s), Gregory Crewdson (Brief Encounters), Colin Prior (he was a local for me for many years and we had overlapping hunting grounds), Nick Brandt (his infrared savannah series).

5. What can Substack community expect from you/your publication in the future? I have 2 substack publications at the moment: I May Be Wrong, and Photoni.st.

I use I May Be Wrong to explore what photography is for me. I try to understand my motivation, how I work, what I try to achieve, and learn from it all. I need to write down my thoughts to debate them with myself so I can go to the bottom of things, so I decided I might as well write it in a more accessible way and share with whoever wants to read it.

I tend to write in semi-manic ways because I'm obsessive, with lots of ideas going through my head and I write several posts in a day. To avoid overloading everybody and then be silent for a while, I've scheduled my posts once a week. I have 3 months of posts in the pipeline ready to go.

I use Photoni.st, which is the name of my photography website, to show some photos from time to time. I also make mini series along my walks or activities. In the future, I'd like to move it to more documentary photography.