John Robison Photography - Equipment choices

I started my artistic career with pen and ink drawings in the fourth grade in Shutesbury, Massachusetts. Somewhat later I moved from drawing to photography, and I began to specialize in candid people photography and documentary photography. Like many people, my first cameras were fully manual, slow, and poorly suited to action photography.

In the 1970s and early 1980s I travelled on the road with KISS and a number of other musical groups as an engineer. Today I am returning to photograph some of those same musicians.

My brother, who writes as NY Times bestselling author Augusten Burroughs, sparked my interest in action photography by giving me a Nikon N90 camera some years ago. He's was a creative director at an ad agency; his agency was working on the Nikon account at the time. I've used Nikon SLRs almost exclusively ever since.

I enjoy the challenge of catching images of people when everything lines up in real life, as opposed to making a studio composition. To use an analogy with music, I'm a fan of live performances, not studio recordings.

That's not to say I don't appreciate studio photography and music, because I do. It's just my second choice. I prefer capturing the emotions of the moment, as they happen.

The images of people on this site, with only a few exceptions, are unposed candid shots.

John Robison