About me...

Photography fascinates me. These days most half-decent cameras sport HD-quality video, but I can't help gravitating toward the still image. It's by far and away my preferred format and a great shot is a piece of art. The skilled use of light and shade is a beautiful thing.

I do commissions (mainly weddings, portraits and sporting events to date) and I've also done some limited print runs, but mainly I take photos just because I love to. Originally the idea was that this would pay for my lens habit, but I'm not sure I've succeeded there, and quite frankly I'm too scared to balance the books. I'm not a professional photographer, I'm actually a systems, virtualization and network engineer, having done stints at some pretty big names both in Australia and internationally, previously at Telstra (Australia's largest telco) and now at Amazon Web Services (AWS). Some time ago my specialization was Windows, then it became VMware, then Cisco routing, switching and UCS servers, and now the AWS cloud. Actually these days it's just kind of everything. I've also worked in the television industry at Channel 7 in Sydney, Australia and also for Bloomberg Television in Tokyo, Japan.

I'm not really a photographer...

...but I really like photography.

The earliest stuff I learnt about photography came from my dad (mainly exposure and framing) on a couple of solid old Prakticas from the 70's - a German camera. Interestingly, one of the predecessors to this camera (the Contax S) was the first 35mm SLR with a built-in pentaprism viewfinder. On my dad's models, you could actually press a button and slide the top section of the viewfinder off for cleaning. I took those things apart and put them back together incessantly.

Some time later (about 20 years, to the point...) was when I really started to get interested in photography myself. This was when I started to travel individually (the beginning of another great love affair...) and wanted to show friends and family all the amazing things I was seeing. Though digital photography was around by this stage, it was incredibly expensive and still not popular. At this point, I was shooting with a Canon EOS A2 - a cracking camera that gave me many years of great service and great shots. I only ever carried two lenses around with the camera, one covering approximately 24 - 120 and the other 70 - 300. Not being a particularly sentimental guy, once I was really into digital with both feet, I sold the Canon to another beginning photographer. Since then, I've mainly used Nikon DSLRs, but the recent (since 2011 or so) spate of quality issues and product recalls has kind of turned me off. I'm now investigating mirrorless cameras and have recently started shooting with an Olypus OM-D 5 MII.