Info

Field Bureau - Traditional photography for the digital age


Analogue photography is so much more than a nostalgic trend. It is an act of resistance against pixel-perfect living. It forces us, its practitioners, to slow down, be more deliberate, more precise. Tactile materials are once again central to the photographic process. Each frame reasserts our subjectivity as the photographer, visual proof of how we experience the beauty before us individually. 

In a world saturated with transient imagery and fleeting impressions, where more is more, where quantity is often conflated with quality, we remain at the service of timeless beauty. Of the singular image. Of refined artistry. Cutting through the noise, celebrating the grain.

We approach photography as a specialised craft that requires skill and respect for the medium. We prioritise lasting impressions over ephemerality. The photograph as a monument to our way of seeing things. We believe that a truly great photo bears the imprint of the person who has taken it. This is who we are. This is the Field Bureau.





Cristian Barnett - Photographer


Since first developing a roll of film at the age of 14 I was hooked on photography. The combination of owning beautiful equipment, taking photographs, processing the film and finally printing a photograph was intoxicating. After studying photography at Newcastle, Salisbury and Gloucester colleges I moved to London and worked as an assistant for many different photographers to learn my trade. Film was the norm back then but later I was a photographer during the transition to digital.

I’m fortunate to have a successful career as a food photographer and hope to carry on working with my clients for many years to come. But seeing AI creep into photography is troubling on many levels - for the first time ever photographic style images can be created easily without light or a camera. My feeling is that this will be a major catastrophe for photography and the only way to create photography with any kind of integrity in future may be shooting with film.

After retiring my film cameras as a professional back in 2005, it has been an incredible experience to return to analogue in a serious way over the last 2 years. Photographers in the 1840s and 1850s would recognise many of the fundamental processes in analogue photography as it’s practiced today. I didn’t want to just grab a point and shoot film camera and call myself a film photographer but to deep dive into the craft, to understand the fundamentals of light, film, paper and processing. That said, I also know it’s impractical to be a photographer today without being able to digitise your work so I have also been working on getting the best from scanned negatives. But you really can’t beat a real darkroom print. Another joy has been rediscovering moving film. As a teenager I owned an 8mm camera and used it with great care (due to the cost!) and now I’m shooting 16mm which has been really exciting.

My hope is to find clients who the see the value of working with a process which can help bring value to what they do and also want photography that represents their values. This will likely involve people working by hand, creating beautiful objects or wanting help to tell their story in a meaningfull way. I also want to support and collaborate with other people who choose to do things the old way. For the creation of Field Bureau I have worked with a copywriter rather than Chat GPT, my logo font was designed from scratch by a designer and my marketing material was printed on a beautiful old Heidelburg platen press (see below).


Field Bureau is my new baby, just at the start of it’s life and I’m not quite sure where it will all lead but I’m certainly excited to find out! 

Cambridgeshire, September 2025. 

A.I. has not knowingly been used in the creation of this website.


Core equipment list

35mm

Olympus OM4 x 3
28mm f2.8
35mm f2.8
55mm f2
100mm f2.8

120

Hasselblad 503 CW
Hasselblad 500 EL/M
CFi 60mm
CFE 80mm
CF120mm

Rolleiflex TLR 3.5T

5x4

Wista 45D 5x4
125mm Fujinon f5.6
135mm Zeiss Jena Tessar f4.5
180mm Zeiss Jena Tessar f4.5





cris@fieldbureau.com
+44 (0) 7771 608277


Logo and brand design - Mateusz Piekarski - www.gp.works