User:John Thaxter

John Thaxter, a widower with two grown-up children, is a life-long theatre enthusiast and a freelance drama critic working in London since 1979. His previous career was as a computer systems designer for BT.

John has contributed regularly to Wikipedia since March 2006, providing a theatrical balance to Wikipedia articles about British performing arts practitioners that would otherwise focus mainly on their screen careers.

He took his first photographs with a Kodak Box Brownie in 1939, ten years later graduating to serious photographic work with the acquisition of a second-hand Kodak Retina (1931 model with a Schneider Kreuznach f3.5 lens). The camera appeared to have been traded for cigarettes in Germany at the end of WW2 and is now in the collection of the Cheshire antiquarian Nino Manci.

John's first major camera was an early model of the Olympus OM1, but when it was stolen by a house guest he traded-up with the insurance to an OM2. As a man of few photographic ambitions he switched to an Olympus Camedia digital camera, C4000 Zoom in July 2003, which he still uses today. But he is also impressed by the quality given by his Nokia 6500 slide mobile phone, fitted with a Zeiss Tessar 2.8/4.5 lens and a resolution of 3.2 megapixels.

He upgrades and stores his photographs using Mac iPhoto software and also uses an Epson scanner for digitizing prints, slides and negatives. John values the co-operation of User:Angmering (especially for uploading the Kew Palace and Helen Mirren pics) and the ever helpful User:MarnetteD, without whom......