It was my very first camera that persuaded me that megapixels aren’t important. The Fujifilm Finepix E550 offered an option to shoot at 800 ISO – at the cost of its image output dropping from 6.3 to 3 megapixels. Not ideal, but in 2004, 800 ISO was a rarity in consumer cameras, so I felt the trade-off was fair.

Visiting the Imperial Car Museum in Las Vegas, I was drawn to this car not just for its shape, but for how it stood so confidently on the showroom floor. The deep green paint, the way the curves caught the light, the quiet confidence of the grille. The whole car just seemed to glow.

This photograph is about admiration. The craftsmanship, the care, the attention to detail that went into objects built to last. It’s also about time: how things age, and are reinvented over time.

The hot rod underwent one final reinvention under my camera. I was just discovering digital photography, naively playing around with JASC Paint Shop Pro to edit my photos. Many of my edits were questionable – pushing saturation to unrealistic levels, for example. But this works. My notes tell me that I used the LucisArt plugin on this image. If so, I’ve long since forgotten what LucisArt did, or how I used it. But what I do know is that 3 megapixels was ample to achieve my creative vision, because I’ve printed this photo at 16×12 inches for exhibition use.

Even today, with phones shooting 50 megapixels plus, my main camera is only 16 megapixels. Size doesn’t matter. .