About Richard Ingle

I was born in 1927 and grew up near Sevenoaks in Kent. When attending a school that had been evacuated to Herefordshire during the war in the early 1940s, my parents took me out one Sunday and we went into the church at Peterchurch in the Golden Valley, not far from the school. The church had some beautiful Norman decoration, narrow slit windows, and a spire reaching high into the sky. It was a profound experience which grew into a life long interest in church architecture.

The second experience that had a major impact on my life was visiting France in 1948 and 1949 when we toured the length and breadth of the country including the Pyrenees, the Alps, Provence and the Central Massif of France in a 1930s Morris 14 car. By this time I had acquired a used Thornton-Pickard ¼ plate camera which took glass plates 3¼ inch x 4¼ inch in size. I exposed about 50 plates, and developed them in my home-made darkroom in a hut in the garden! Possibly I might put up a small panel of about 12 pictures on this Website one day?

My working life has been as a chemistry teacher and in teacher education, both in Britain and in Uganda during the 1960s. It was here that I used photography, with the help of my students, in producing booklets, for example on ‘Salt in East Africa’ and ‘Refining of Petroleum in East Africa’.

During my time in teaching and in teacher education, from 1952 – 1991, life was too full to allow me to do the exacting work on a large format camera. During this time, I used 35mm cameras only. Shortly before retirement I decided that I wanted to return to large format photography of church interiors on account of its versatility. So, in 1985 I bought a Japanese 54 Wista Field Camera which took cut film roughly 5 x 4 inches in size that proved to be an excellent camera, and for which I have several lenses covering the range from very wide angle (65mm), normal wide angle (90mm) and medium angle (135mm).

After retirement, I have continued to use my Wista 54 camera. My 5 x 4 negatives, from which I used to make large prints in the darkroom, can now be scanned, adjusted in Photoshop and printed on an ink jet printer.

For most of my life, I have taken photographs of church interiors in black and white. However, about 10 years ago, I started taking some of my photographs of architectural interiors in colour. Unfortunately the cost of 5 x 4 sheets of colour film and that of processing the film, made this procedure very costly. Fortunately, I had recently met the camera maker Jack Tait and discussed making a modification to one of the cameras in his TLC1 range. This would make it particularly suitable for architectural photography. He came up with a near perfect design for me. The camera he made takes ten 6cm x 7cm images on a 120 roll film. I asked him to modify his usual design for me by incorporating a particularly bright and accurate direct vision viewfinder that was ganged to the rising front of the lens. I think this camera must have been one of the last that he made before he retired.

As for the details of sculpture and fascinating wood carvings found in medieval churches, these can be effectively photographed with a 35mm film camera or a Digital SLR.