16th May 2007 (my birthday) so a good day to launch this new site which is a new compilation of articles and reviews written for the consumer magazine market as well as my popular weblog hosted by the US-based Salon publishing and internet company. Around 90% of the many hundreds of daily hits on my weblog come from Google keyword and image searches where an increasing number of his pages hold the #1 spot. There is no way to fool the Google search engine... as is said in the trade, high rankings only come about because content is king. My magazine and newspaper work spanned 30-years as a freelance writer and photographer. I quickly realised that editors had difficulty finding photos to accompany words and vice versa. When they received my package with an interesting article and a selection of compelling images they were more likely to use this speculative submission because their job was already half done.

Digital is hot... but using film is really cool!
My submissions of articles and images for the internet started late because of a reluctance to adopt digital as a way of working. Having shot with film in sizes from 35mm, through 120 roll to 4x5, 5x7 and 8x10 inch large formats and printed all my own monochrome work in traditional darkrooms - as well as processing all of my colour transparency materials - I found it difficult to adopt a digital way of working and post-processing on an Apple Mac after so many years of days and nights in a darkroom with my fingers in trays of chemistry. For seven years during this period I published and edited “Darkroom User,” a specialist photography magazine (later retitled “Camera & Darkroom”) which kept me in the darkroom literally day and night!

However, in continuing my association with the Nikon system I went digital in 2006 with a Nikon D200... choosing that particular model because with it I was able to use all my older, but still very good, manual lenses. In fact I have used so many Nikkors over the years (borrowing several when I was a lecturer for the Nikon Club and then a Nikon Professional Services member) that my first thoughts for this new “20/20 Visions” site was to have a listing just for Nikon optics... although narrowing those I have used and owned to just 20 examples was more difficult.

There will be 20 categories each with 20 subjects...
From this start I decided to write about and illustrate many other favourite subjects... making a list of twenty categories each with twenty subjects... eventually making 400 articles in all. This is not such a tall order because of the variety of subjects I have covered in the past. Initially there will be sections from my “Art Classes” to “Wiltshire”... an A-to-W because I have no X, Y or Z categories to round off the alphabet!

There will be a 50/50 split between photography and more general subjects, with a number of pages being updated regularly as the subject changes with the seasons... trees, for example, will eventually have four separate entries each as I observe and record their visual changes throughout the four seasons.

Other updates may happen when a technology or practice changes... darkroom work may see a resurgence with new chemistry being formulated, spin-off papers from the ink-jet industry and traditional films being reintroduced (Ilford have just announced the return of their near-IR film SFX200... so those who predicted the death of film were overstating the obvious advantages of digital).

About Ed Buziak...
All articles and reviews have been written by Ed - a self-taught photographer and monochrome printer who, in 1974 at the age of 30, took a leap of faith into the tough professional world of photography. Even before that, on his graduation day in 1967 at The Regional College of Art, Manchester, he realised, rather late in his studies, that he wanted to be a photographer, not the interior designer he had trained to be. So he bought into the Nikon system with a cheap, un-metered, manual Nikkormat FS body and a 135mm telephoto lens. From that beginning he learned how to select an image through the camera’s viewfinder, process and print film, and enter photo competitions. Winning a bag-full of Nikon bodies and Nikkor lenses, almost immediately, was instrumental in steering him through a career change from a secure well-paid production design job with Granada TV to a life as a freelance photographer where he quickly learned that in the eyes of any commissioning features editor, agency art director or picture library manager,"You were only as good as the last job you did for them!"

But he survived to tell the tale... many of which will be written up and illustrated here...