"Widescreen"

12.02
page 25
Nikon Pro Magazine

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‘Parties and events are still an inspring subject,’ says British high-society photographer Dafydd Jones. He has owned the steadiest hands of the soiree for the past 20 years, in which time his pictures have turned from candid black-and-whites of the young aristocracy losing its inhibitions to colour panoramas of the celebrity wheels in motion.
‘When I started, this was an overlooked area,” he says, ‘so it was relatively easy to get work. Now there are a great many photographers chasing people at parties.’
Jones only turned to colour in 1996, so his recent conversion to digital seems an almost overnight revolution. ‘As soon as I started using colour, I began experimenting with a computer instead of the darkroom. I started to do Quicktime VR movies of the social season, panoramic pictures of restuarants amd illustrations for feature stories. In my red-carpet series I’m trying to use this panoramic time-lapse technique to capture the reality of how it feels to be a celebrity at these media events.’
For such jobs, often seen in British and American broadsheet newspapers, his F5 and Coolscan 11 have made way for a D1X. ‘I have always set exposure manually and usually have to use a 28mm or 30mm Nikkor, then run a custom version of Apple’s Quicktime Authoring studio for stitching it all together.’