My name is David Osborn. I always I wanted to do ‘something’ artistic after school, so I spent my first year at art college studying fine art, however, combined with an inability to draw, fine art as a career seemed a bit optimistic and risky. The starving artist image never appealed. Studying graphic design was my compromise but spending weeks working on one project behind a desk was too slow. I’m an impatient personality. As result, I spent my time shooting photo-stories. Photography provided a more instant result, while being out and about in life with real people. This evolved into wanting to do news photography as a career.

All images used with permission from David Osborn. Want to be featured? Here’s how!

The Essential Camera Gear of David Osborn

Nikon D850 Camera

Sigma 50mm & 85mm ART lenses

Novoflex VR-System PRO II HD Panoramic Head

Novoflex Leveling Head MagicBalance

Gitzo GT3543LS Carbon tripod

Adobe Photoshop and PTGui stitching software

David Osborn

I use a panoramic technique. It is my best solution for the type of photograph I create – wide-angle views with corrected architectural perspectives. The panoramic process allows me to shoot wide-angle views without the extreme distortion wide-angle lenses give. The panoramic process began with investing in a Sigma 50mm ART lens. This lens and a Nikon D800E camera gave me incredible sharpness and detail. I wanted to retain that sharpness, but a 50mm lens is too limiting. I experimented shooting multiple frames handheld and stitching them together then made the process more efficient by buying the panoramic head to shoot multiple row panoramas. Camera wise, I am not a fan of digital view finders, mirrorless; I feel I have a better judgement of the subtle changes in light by looking through the viewfinder of a DSLR. With the rise in popularity of mirrorless, I was concerned that Nikon might stop making DSLR’s – so invested in the Nikon D850 in case that happened.

It is now my primary camera, my D800E a backup. In some instances, the subject is a little further away than I prefer, so the Sigma 85mm ART solves the issue. I always want to keep the feel, or perspective of my images natural looking which is why I keep to more standard focal prime lenses. To create the images, I only use PTGui to stitch the images together first, then Photoshop for everything else. PTGui is much faster and more reliable than Photoshop for stitching, while being brilliant at correcting the perspective distortions without any loss of image sharpness.

What photographers are your biggest influences? How did they affect who you are and how you create?

Originally photographers like Bert Hardy who created photo-stories for Picture Post magazine and whom I met during photography lectures but then when I began news work, learning from the older photographers at Reuters in London. They were masters at ‘getting the shot’, telling stories in one frame. When I eventually moved into corporate work, it was more the photographs than photographers that inspired me. Trying to reverse engineer beautiful annual report images; the lighting, composition, story-telling aspect. Currently, being involved in Photoshop and digital retouching, it’s advertising photographers like Eric Almas and Tom Nagy, seeing how they use photography combined with digital retouching to create modern but not literal looking images. They showed me that digital retouching offers great creative potential to create fine art images.

How long have you been shooting? How do you feel you’ve evolved since you started?

I’ve been working as a photographer for over 36 years. I began working as a news photographer in 1985, then moved to corporate photography shooting annual reports. Now teaching and producing fine art images. Looking back, I think the two common motivations are a love of quality craftsmanship and using photography to tell a story. News was about the event, more the adrenalin rush of the moment. Corporate images were more about the...