It was a great atmosphere. The band were relaxed and at ease with each other and with me. They were hitting their stride musically and as a team, and this really comes across in the combination of confidence and energy and strength in the pictures.

4. We noticed on your Instagram that you have recently begun going over your older work during the grunge era with various Sub Pop artists (from Kurt to TAD, and more), do you have any memories or experiences from those shoots that stand out to you?

All the Sub-Pop pictures happened over one week when I flew out to Seattle with Everett True to do a feature on the label. It came about because Bruce Pavitt at Sub Pop had figured out that he needed to get a British music paper to write about Sub Pop if he wanted to get attention in the US. He knew Everett was interested in the Sub Pop bands, so he blew his entire (very small) marketing budget on paying for our flights to Seattle. Once we got there, they didn’t have enough money left to pay for hotels, so we had to sleep on the floor in one of the band’s house. We did interviews and shoots every day, and live concerts every night. Drank a lot of coffee and Mexican beer. Partied all over Seattle. The big story that came out of the trip coined the expression “The Seattle Scene” and got the label and the town a huge amount of media and industry attention.

5. Tell us a little bit about your gear and favorite lenses and what you think about the progression of photography since it has entered the digital realm.

For the Soundgarden shoot I was using a Canon F1nAE, a Canon T90, a Rolleiflex 2.8 80mm Planar, and a Panon Widelux panoramic camera. With the Canons, I would use mainly 28mm, 35mm, 50mm, 85mm, and 70-210mm FD lenses. These are all manual focus, and I would mainly use manual exposure as well. All except the T90 are mechanical cameras that do not rely on electronics for control. This is important, because it makes them more predictable.

With a mechanical camera, when you press the shutter the delay before the picture is taken is always exactly the same. Over time, you learn to know this delay, and you press the shutter slightly before the point you anticipate the picture. A bit like somebody trying to shoot a bird has to aim ahead of it.

With modern digital cameras, the time between pressing the shutter and the picture being taken is always different. There are delays while the autofocus works, the exposure is calculated, the various settings are applied, and these are different from one exposure to the next, so you can never learn the time delay and work with it. This makes the process of photographing far less precise with modern cameras. The designers try to get round this by building cameras that shoot faster and faster, capturing sequences of frames in the hope that one will be good. But however fast they shoot there is enough time for the blink of an eye between each frame and the next, and the blink of an eye is a long time.

There is something special about shooting on film. You always know that the piece of film has a permanent direct connection to the subject. It was recorded with the light coming directly off them, exactly as it was, and you can always go back to that. Digital is removed from that; the image is being modified and manipulated from the moment it is recorded. You end up with multiple copies and versions of the original file, and you never know how much it has been changed or adjusted. It loses it’s pure connection to the subject.