About

Photography has been a passion for me since my late teens; though I got excited about photography much earlier than that. It was when I started using the family Box Brownie - how old does that make me? The first shot I remember taking was at Chessington Zoo (it was real zoo then, not a theme park). It was on black and white film, and was of what then seemed to be a very large swan. As I approached it the huge bird spread its brilliant white wings out wide, probably to tell me to keep away. The contrast in that photo between the brilliant white wings and the dull overcast sky that day was very dramatic. The impact of that simple black and white print has never left me. I still get as much enjoyment from viewing the results of a days shoot, even though now the end result is enjoyed on a monitor.

For a day job I work for a large IT services company so the megabytes and megapixels of digital photography probably came a little more easily to me, I guess, than it has to some. I shoot almost exclusively in raw digital mode and I've now standardised my workflow on Adobe Lightroom. I also use Adobe Photoshop, mostly, when I'm working with older scanned images and for batch tasks. I'm using SlideShowPro within Lightroom to help create my galleries.

I've gradually moved from film, to digital compact (in 2002) to digital SLR in 2004. I stopped using film (except now and then for fun) after my last trip to the American South West in 2005. Looking at the film and digital images from that trip I decided that neither was better or worse than the other. They just looked "different". From a practical perspective the major difference was that the digital images were all "free" - no additional processing costs when I got back - except my time in post-processing. You get so much more chance to experiment with digital; and with immediate feedback. That, for me, is the winning combination.

For the last 30 or so years I've been a Nikon user progressing through an FE, F801 and F80. Digitally I've graduated from a D70 to a D200 and presently using a D300. The equipment is nice to have but for me at least half the enjoyment of photography is simply the excuse it provides to get out and about in the fresh air and explore new places.

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