About

Quick preamble: I'd just like to mention up front that I have a MySpace page and a Flickr photostream, in case you found one of my cards and are curious.

I currently live in Orrell Park near Liverpool in England. I'm 26 and photography is just a hobby of mine, done in my spare time. Right now I don't want to do it as a job because it's just far too enjoyable and I would not like the lack of freedom I'd get doing it for work.

Ever since I was a child I've been fascinated by the world around me, its colours, textures, shapes and so on. I wanted to capture some of that beauty but have always felt constrained by poor drawing and painting skills. One day I tried out a 3D graphics program called Terragen and a whole new avenue of artistic expression opened up to me: I could at last create images that more closely resembled the kinds of things I saw in nature.

For a time I was happy with Terragen but eventually came to feel held back once more by its limitations. It can undoubtedly generate amazingly realistic scenes of nature but I wanted more, though at the time I didn't know what exactly I wanted.

Then one day something happened that changed my life: I got a digital camera. It may seem strange to lend such weight to something like this but it really is true. I now realised that this was my artistic calling. My camera, a little Fuji 4800Z, went almost everywhere with me. I loved that thing, taking it to college every day and amassing around 4,700 photos in the approximately two years I had it. By today's standards the two megapixel images it produced are pretty rough, and the amount of manual control was fairly minimal, but since I didn't know any better I didn't care and in a way this was liberating. I could concentrate more on the important things in photography like composition, lighting, perspective and so forth.

It really cannot be emphasised enough how much of an effect the little Fuji had on my life, so you can imagine my disappointment when it got stolen (from right in front of me, no less)! In a way though I was strangely relieved because by that time I had really started to press up against the camera's limitations. I wanted more manual control, I wanted more pixels, I wanted a better lens. I'd been doing my homework and I decided I wanted a Canon PowerShot G5. Unfortunately by then they were at the end of their lifecycle and nowhere had them in stock so I got a Canon PowerShot S50 instead, thinking I would trade slight flexibility for a substantially smaller camera.

The S50 and I really didn't get along, something I touch upon in my article Brief Encounter. I tried for around a year to like the camera but in the end I had to admit I just didn't, so I sold it and bought a Nikon D70 and all was right with my world once more—this is what I had been wanting all along!

Or so it seemed for nine months or so. There was (and still is) nothing wrong with the camera as such, it just began to feel like too much of a burden. I continued to carry it around as much as I ever did, but more and more reluctantly. I then remembered an article on Luminous Landscape about the Pentax DS and felt that this would be the ideal camera: small and light with an excellent viewfinder and the compatibility with old manual focus (thus cheap) lenses. Despite this, I now very rarely use manual focus lenses since they're difficult to use and I've now got autofocus lenses that (almost) cover the range of focal lengths I commonly use. A well-known affliction amongst Pentax users is LBA: lens buying addiction. Sadly I'm an addict as I now have around nine lenses and still I want more! Pentax 77mm Ltd, DA 16-50 f/2.8, DA 50-135 f/2.8, Tamron 28-75 f/2.8... I fear this list will grow as I acquire more glass.

While the DS is a nice camera in many ways, I began to miss the speed of the Nikon, especially on photoshoots where the slowness of the DS became frustrating. The announcement of the Pentax K10D interested me greatly since this seemed the ideal camera for me: faster, better controls, weatherproof, RGB histograms, built-in shake reduction. I got one in the middle of December 2006 and while it's bigger and quite a bit heavier than the DS, its performance continues to impress. I've used it on a number of shoots now and it's never let me down. I still keep the DS around for backup or for when I want to travel light but the K10 is my workhorse camera, and should be for many years to come.

So there you have it, a bit about me. I also have a MySpace page which is more of a personal and networking thing than this site.