Roger Longdin’s passion for photography has very deep roots. He began photographing when he was 10 years old and he first picked up a Box Brownie. From the age of 14 Roger was using a darkroom to develop his films and prints.
Photographing local farms and wider landscapes, the images he made reflected his lifelong love of the land. Alongside the monochrome work he has always shot colour transparency, beginning with Kodachrome on a hand-me-down Ilford Sportsman.
Other cameras followed; a Zenith E-1, a Canon A1 and then a medium format Kowa 66. Then, in 1980, he joined the Amersham Photographic Society. Roger is still a member today. He entered his work into slide competitions and began to get feedback.
In the early 1990’s, Roger visited Charlie Waite’s Battersea studio, after he placed an advert selling his 5″x7” Gandolfi. It was here that he learnt about Charlie’s nascent photo workshop company, Light & Land. Roger joined the very first Light & Land workshop in the Lake District in 1994. He has now attended over fifty tours and workshops. Roger never bought Charlie’s Gandolfi, settling for a 5×4 Technikardan instead.
For the last six years Roger has taken part in the Bucks Open Studio event in June, opening his studio to show people his large format images, most of which he has printed himself. Possessed by the lustrous quality of colour prints on Cibachrome, he negotiated the purchase of the remaining of stock of the colour papers. Over the last year, he has built a state of the art colour and black and white darkroom.
Roger loves the discovery of new locations and practising seeing. His travels with photographers like David Ward, Joe Cornish and Charlie Waite have taken to places as diverse as the Canadian Rockies, Tuscany, Iceland, Death Valley, Ireland and Namibia. But at heart he’s still a tiller of the land, still a farmer who loves nothing more than tramping the fields… And it’s this intimate connection with the land that informs his photography in a deep and evocative way.