I started out using a... a Rolleiflex when I left school, but soon wanted to use longer lenses for portraiture and for animals who I could get near to, and started to use single lens reflex cameras. In those days there was the Primaflex, a German camera, later an Agiflex, an English camera, which was quite good except I had some difficulty with the spacing of the negatives. They sometimes overlapped a bit, and when the Hasselblad came to Britain, I was one of the first to buy one, and that was my main camera for many years, with three lenses, 80mm, 150, 250. But in my old age it became too heavy for me to carry about with the three lenses, and I switched over to 35mm, a Canon camera. And now I play about with a digital camera because I can put it in my pocket, but I also have a... a more professional digital camera with a very good lens — a Zeiss lens — a Sony camera. On the film side we used Arriflex mainly after the war, even for sound; they did cameras which were almost soundproof.

Has film stock been getting faster over the years?

Film stock certainly got faster for stills and for film. It was quite difficult in the early days to film in poor light, something which can be done easily nowadays. But when the fast films came I... I happened to be in Thailand, I think, and talking to film people. They say... they told me ‘It’s terrible, this film is so fast, what are we going to do? We can’t...we have so much sunlight here’. They didn’t know they could use neutral dense... neutral filter, neutral density filters, or use a smaller opening in the shutter if their camera was adjustable... had an adjustable shutter. But nowadays it... everything has become so small and much easier and much faster. Life has become too easy almost, certainly for producers who send out a cameraman on the job without any assistant or without even a soundman. We... it was, in documentary films, it was very pleasant to work with a small crew of about four to six people, and maybe a couple of electricians, more if necessary. If I... if I had to film in a big steelworks, I needed say 10 arc lights and the cabling of the big arc lights was very, very heavy and we needed a good number of people. But, on documentary films when travelling about, you were practically married to your colleagues, you stayed in the same hotel, you ate in the same restaurant, and you were very close. But on a feature film, you had 60 to 80 people working, although the camera crew was always close, and when you watched a film unit on location outdoors, you saw five people around the camera: the cameraman, the operator, the director and the grip, who had to move the dolly and set up the tripod and so on, and the rest of the 60 people were sitting in the grass watching. Of course many of them had to get up at five o'clock to do the make-up and do the wardrobe and they had done all their jobs and were there in case there was need for the hairdresser to comb the hair or the... the wardrobe woman or man to change the wardrobe, and of course the continuity girl was always around the camera too. They call them script supervisor now.