He is famous for never using a light meter on the set of Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981).
In 1981 he was a member of the 'Official Competition' jury at the 34th Cannes International Film Festival.
He was awarded the O. B. E. (Officer of the Order of the British Empire) in the 2008 Queen's New Year Honours List for his services to the film industry.
He spent more than 17 years as a cameraman at Ealing Studios, shooting many classics such as 'Kind Hearts and Coronets', 'Lavender Hill Mob' and 'The Man in the White Suit'.
He won BAFTA Awards in 1964, 1975 and 1979 and was nominated for an Oscar three times.
He spent part of his education in France, where his journalist father George Edward Slocombe (1894-1963) was the Daily Herald's Paris correspondent. His mother Marie (née Karlinsky) was Russian and married his father in London in 1912.
Slocombe initially aimed to become a photojournalist and, as a young photographer, witnessed the early events that led to the outbreak of World War II.
He was commissioned by the American filmmaker Herbert Kline to shoot the events of the documentary Lights Out, which covered a Goebbels rally and the burning of a synagogue, and was briefly arrested.
He found the Technirama camera system used on Davy (1958) "a block of flats" and sometimes found the widescreen equipment restrictive and difficult to shoot with.
He graduated in mathematics from the Sorbonne.
The style of "Saraband for Dead Lovers", about an ill-fated extramarital affair in 17th-century Germany, was unusually praised and criticised for being overly symbolic, while its exterior and interior shots also matched badly.
In his later years he lived in West London with his daughter, his only child.
He received particular praise for the flexible, high-contrast cinematography of the horror film Dead of Night (1945) and for the bright, colourful West Country summer landscapes of The Titfield Thunderbolt.
He was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the 2008 New Year Honours and attended a BAFTA dinner held in his honour in 2009.
For "Saraband for Dead Lovers" (1948), shot in Technicolor, the production team settled on a quiet, sombre style that was unusual for its time and that Slocombe in 2015 regarded as among the best work of his career.
Alongside shooting, Slocombe, as part of the pre-production of The Captive Heart (1946), also worked on developing plans for filming by visiting prisoner-of-war camps in Germany.
Slocombe would later speak approvingly of Ealing's script development culture. However, he also stated that the restrictive studio system under Michael Balcon, where outside work was normally not permitted, made it impossible for him to try to start a career as a director.
Not all reviews of his later colour work were positive: his cinematography on Never Say Never Again (1983) was described by one writer as "subtle, subdued… it creates a mellow mood", while also being judged "muddled and brown".
From the 1980s onwards Slocombe had problems with his sight, including a retinal detachment in one eye and complications from failed laser eye surgery in the other, and he was nearly blind at the end of his life.
Janusz Kaminski, the cinematographer of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, said he deliberately shot the film to imitate Slocombe's visuals in order to create a look of continuity with the earlier films.
One of the special-effect shots he created was a scene in Kind Hearts and Coronets in which Alec Guinness plays eight different characters and six of them are shown in the same frame at the same time. By masking the lens and fixing the camera at a single point, the film was re-exposed several times over several days while Guinness was in different parts of the film set. Slocombe recalled that he slept in the studio to make sure no one touched the camera.
Despite his blindness, Slocombe continued to be able to give interviews in his final years and was interviewed by David A. Ellis for a book titled Conversations with Cinematographers, on French television in 2011, by the BBC on the invasion of Poland in 2014 and about the history of British films in 2015. In the last interview he was reported to have said, "it's a weird feeling to have outlived virtually everyone you ever worked with."
Roger Ebert particularly praised his work on Jesus Christ Superstar (1973), writing that it "achieves a color range that glows with life and somehow doesn't make the desert look barren."
On 1 September 1939, when Germany invaded, Slocombe was in Warsaw with a film camera. He escaped in the company of Herbert Kline, but their train was machine-gunned by a German aircraft. After fleeing the train, Slocombe and Kline bought a horse-drawn cart from a Polish farm and eventually returned to London via Latvia and Stockholm.
Slocombe became a cinematographer for the Ministry of Information and shot footage of the Fleet Air Arm and Atlantic convoys.
In the 1980s he worked with Steven Spielberg on the first three Indiana Jones films, after Spielberg had enjoyed working with him as second-unit cinematographer on Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977).
He developed a relationship with Ealing Studios, where the filmmaker Alberto Cavalcanti, who helped him get his position, worked. Some of his photographs were used as second-unit material for fiction films.
One criticism leveled at Slocombe was that he lacked a signature style. Even so, his versatility was a sign of his strength.
When work on a French Alexander Korda production fell through because he had no work permit, and his hopes of joining the Gainsborough Studios apprenticeship program were dashed, Slocombe ended up spending three years as a young news editor at British United Press in London, while also writing a Paris bulletin (from London) under a pseudonym.
His two preoccupations were film and journalism. Photography, a childhood passion, began at the age of seven with a Kodak Box Brownie.
He also led a far more colorful life than most of those in front of his camera. In 2010, in honor of Bafta, the 10-year-old Slocombe had met James Joyce.
By his twenties he was selling his photographs increasingly on an international scale, which led him to establish himself as a photographer in advertising on his own, while continuing to sell to magazines such as Picture Post, Life and Paris Match, and writing articles and short stories.
He contributed the cinematography to three films nominated for the Best Picture Oscar: The Lion in Winter (1968), Julia (1977) and Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981).
As a former journalist, he reported on Germany's invasion of Poland and the Netherlands.
Slocombe was a British cinematographer known especially for his work at Ealing Studios in the 1940s and 1950s, as well as for the first three Indiana Jones films.
Slocombe regarded Basil Dearden as the "most competent" of the directors he personally worked with at Ealing.