Professionally, I am an IT Analyst/Programmer, but photography has been my main hobby since the mid to late 1980s. I plodded along as a "snapper", and slowly drifted away from the hobby in the late 1990s. In 2000, in an attempt to re-ignite my interest, I bought myself a new auto-focus camera, had a particularly good holiday photography-wise, and booked myself on a City and Guilds landscape photography course at the Watershed in Bristol. I got hooked again.
Following on from that course, I did another 4 courses at the Watershed, gaining a full C&G Stage 2 qualification. The courses revolutionised my photography, taking me from someone who was keen but never put much thought into his work, and changed me into someone much more thoughtful and creative, and interested in trying new things. I also made some very good friends.
Since 2000, I have taken a massive amount of photos, and almost all of the work that you will see on this site comes from that period.
Equipment
I mainly use a Nikon D200 with Sigma 10-20mm, Nikon 18-200VR and 70-300VR lenses. I occasionally use a Cosina 100mm macro lens.
I used to use a Nikon F80 with 19-35, 28-135 and 70-300mm lenses, while a couple of years ago I bought an Olympus OM1n with
24, 28, 50 and 135mm lenses, which I really enjoy using - the Zuiko lenses are superb. I have also recently inherited a Contax G2.
I have also been known to use pinhole cameras of various types, as well as a medium format Lubitel.
For snaps, I use a Panasonic FX-37 - one of the few compact cameras with a wide-angle lens.
Website
The original version of this website was hand-coded in XHTML 1.0, and formatted using CSS 2.1 - this means that all of the formatting is carried without tables or frames.
It has now been re-written in PHP linked to a MySQL database to make it easier to maintain.
Most of the HTML/CSS knowledge came from the excellent book "HTML for the World Wide Web with XHTML and CSS: Visual QuickStart Guide, Fifth Edition"
by Elizabeth Castro (Peachpit Press).
