For more than 60 years Ian Shiffman has hung around the world's busiest ports (and evaded arrest more than once), all so he can take pictures of ships, writes Oliver Roberts When you think of a man whose lifelong hobby it has been to photograph ships, you instinctively imagine that the guy is probably a bit of a nerd. So what's remarkable about the man I'm about to introduce to you is that, despite more than 60 years sidelining his days with obsessive ship-spotting, he has, at times, led a vaguely James Bondesque lifestyle involving champagne cruises on luxury liners, obscure fame, near-arrests in exotic ports and marriage to a Peter Stuyvesant model.The name's Shiffman, Ian Shiffman, even though, by all logic, it should absolutely be Ian Shipman. When I suggest this to Shiffman, when I tell him he should have changed his surname a very long time ago, he recounts the derogatory and not very original mutation of his name that his classmates invented for him during his school days. And so, because we all agree that Ian Shiffman should be Ian Shipman, he will be referred to from here on in as Shipman or The Shipman.The infatuation began when he got measles at the age of eight or nine and his mother bought him cut-out models of the Queen Mary and the Queen Elizabeth, both of which he built feverishly. Once free of the pox, he told his father he wanted to start taking pictures of the ships in Cape Town harbour and Shipman was soon in possession of a Brownie box camera and then, a couple of years on, a Kodak Retina. It was with the latter that he began taking colour slides and amassing what is today one of the largest collections of ship-themed colour slides on the planet (but more about that later).full_story_image_hleft1When the Suez Canal closed for six months in 1956, the boy Shipman cycled to the harbour after school and took what were to become very rare shots of Suez-bound merchant ships docked there. In 1967, the canal closed again, this time for eight years, and Shipman, now with car, used to spend "most of the day" in the harbour, not really knowing that he was in the process of building up a unique record of "diverts" - ships diverted from the Suez Canal."I started travelling to international ports," says Shipman. "The first trip was to Singapore in 1975; I've done 14 trips there in total. I hired the bumboat every day and went up and down the harbour for eight or nine hours."I've done a couple of trips to the Panama Canal too. The first time the canal was still under US control, and one day I was next to my car taking pictures and this young cop comes up and says, 'Don't touch your camera. Put your hands on the car like this' - like you see in a movie, and I thought, 'Hell'.I told him taking pictures of ships was my hobby, and after checking my passport he said, 'OK, relax,' but I was terrified."Piraeus, Greece, was where The Shipman was chased by port police in 1969 and came perilously close to arrest "over paranoia" and it was only because of a quick-witted taxi driver that Shipman escaped what he said would have been a "Midnight Express-type scenario" of sweaty incarceration and oblivion.The result of all these travels and adventures is that Shipman, now 72, has a collection of more than 440,000 colour slides ("the garage is packed to the roof with boxes"). Some slides are from collections that Shipman bought from deceased estates, but the bulk of the collection is his own work.mini_story_image_vright2His photographs appear on websites and in publications all over the world, including in Jane's Merchant Ships "the bible of all shipping", and he was commissioned to do aerial shots of the Queen Mary "when she came here" in March 2010."I'm not bragging," he says, "but my name is known throughout the world among shipping people."Recently, The Shipman began scanning his colour slides and selling the originals on eBay. So rare are some slides (especially from the '60s, '70s and '80s), and so compulsive are ship-lovers of the Shipman ilk, that the man has barely had to touch his pension fund, such are the prices that people are prepared to pay for a single colour slide of a rare and beautiful vessel.Shipman's Hout Bay study is lined with editions of Jane's and models of ships that he has either bought or been given by the captains of the actual ships, who invite Shipman to their staterooms on account of his fame.There's also a photograph of Shipman taken the day he proposed to Kim, she, in white bikini, looking very much in ownership of an international passport to smoking pleasure (did I mention that this engagement took place in the Amazon rainforest?) and he, in a separate photograph, tuxedoed, looking not at all like a man with 440,000 colour slides of merchant ships stacked in his garage."I don't know," he says when I ask him what it is about ships and the photographing of them that he loves so much."I remember going to Holland and sitting on the new waterway there. You'd see the Dutch and the Germans and dozens of other photographers all sitting there in the summer months with their cameras around their necks. We're just drawn to ships, I suppose."..