Documentary Photography | Woods & Porter, Dartford

Walking into Woods & Porter on West Hill in Dartford you get the sense of a true camera shop. Lenses lined up in cabinets and a whole shop with cameras, equipment and books on photography. Many of them are older than myself. This was a welcome sight for me as I have always wanted to work in a camera shop. I find myself not counting places like Jessops & Currys as camera shops, as I have worked in both of them and they are only really interested in selling the brand new models. When I first started at Jessops a lot of the stock was film based with a healthy supply of darkroom but if you were to enter a Jessops store today, it’s not the same sight and although I am fully aware that the market is now digital, I have always had a tendency, a fondness if you will for film photography. As it has often been said, I was born 20 years too late.

When in the past I had a spare twenty minutes or so I would pop into the store. Mainly just to look around but I enjoyed the atmosphere in there all the same. Don’t get me wrong I had bought items from there in the past and sent a few things in for repair. I sent a Centon K200 camera into the shop for repair because my little brother wanted a digital SLR and I told him he had to master a film SLR first. He mastered the film SLR fine but it didn’t hold his interest too long as his first love is music and so he didn’t pursue getting a digital SLR. Just so you know, an SLR is a camera that is mainly characterised by having a mirror system internally allowing you to see out of the lens [which are interchangeable] and therefore being able to frame your shot perfectly. This mirror system is called a Single Lens Reflex giving us the acronym SLR. As you probably know if you have read this blog before, I try to do more than just a paragraph and several photos. I try to tech a little bit here and there. As well as an SLR [Single Lens Reflex] you can get a TLR [which is an acronym for a Twin Lens Reflex]. I have used a TLR is a few posts in the blog. Feel free to click links below to view the previous TLR based posts.

General Photography | London Through The TLR
Date Posted: Friday, 10^th September 2010

Travel Photography | Pisa, Italy
Date Posted: Monday 23^rd August 2010

So, keeping with tradition, early last week whilst I was in Dartford I decided to pop into Woods & Porter and that’s when I found out the last day of business on the premises will be Friday, 24^th of September 2010 [the intended date of publish for this post]. This saddened me slightly if I’m to tell you the truth. It puts the nearest camera shop [by my definition earlier in the post] in Eltham. This, in all fairness isn’t a vast distance to travel, but at the same the time it isn’t a commute that I would take in my spare time.

On the bus home that day I had the idea for this post. I wanted to document the store. Make sure that it would be remembered if that makes sense. So the next day I popped in and asked if it were ok if I popped back on the next Tuesday [21^st September 2010] and photographed the shop as a small documentary piece. The owner agreed and I went on my way.

On the Tuesday morning I had a baby photo shoot to do and I went to the shop at around 3pm and whilst taking the baby photographs I had the idea of expanding on my original idea and turn it into an interview as well. So that as well as photographing and documenting the shop I could also learn the history of the store which, now that I was aware of the store’s closure, became considerably more interesting to me. And so with my arrival to the store I asked if an interview was ok and he was ok with it. So from that commenced my very first [and hopefully not my last] interview.

The photographs in this post were taken with a Canon EOS 50D using a Sigma 18-50mm f2.8 lens as that was the camera and lens that I used earlier in the day. The interview is about 1,700 words and so I have made it a downloadable PDF which I will place just below this paragraph. The reason that I put it as a downloadable PDF was that I didn’t want the post to run too long. I have included 12 photographs with this post. As always you can feel free to contact me about anything to do with the blog or photography in general you can find how to do that on the contact page. Hope you enjoy the photographs.

Interview With Roger Woods – Right Click and ‘Save Link As’ to download the PDF.

EDIT: Sunday, 7th November 2010
I was recently informed that there were a few mistakes with the interview on the PDF file. With the spelling of some names. So I have corrected this and placed the new PDF below for download and I don’t really believe in masking over old mistakes so the old PDF will remain on this post for download. Please see link below. Thanks.

Interview With Roger Woods NEW

Advertisement