My photography.

I still consider myself to be amateurish in photography after many years of almost obsessive picture taking. I love to capture 'the moment' in time and then look back many years later and say to myself 'I was there'. It's safe to say I inherited the photography bug from my late grandmother as she always had a camera in hand and had amassed hundreds of photographs of her children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren. All her photo's have a great sentimentality attached and I have the images safely scanned and backed up on my PC. I had a fantastic and loving upbringing and cherish all the moments that were captured on film and that's why I mirror my grandmothers passion for capturing the moment! I have literally documented my sons growing up from the moment they were born and they will have a 'Life' collection as part of their inheritance, just as I did.

I never strive to achieve the perfect picture or anything of a commercial value, after all, it's cut throat competition out there and I could simply never compete! I'm at my happiest when I'm with my family and taking photographs of our comings and goings. Occasionally I sense I may have a photograph that stands out a little more than the mediocrity of the rest of my collection, but on the whole my photography is just plain average. My family are happy with the results and our house is like a small gallery with framed pictures of here and there. I'm often asked by friends or family to fit a photo to a frame, I usually have something in my archives from that particular occasion and I enjoy using Photoshop. In 2000 I photographed a friends wedding, it was the most nerve racking experience of my life and I was constantly wiping the sweat of fear off my hands. I was quite pleased with the results and more importantly so were they and they had the whole collection. It was an experience I'll never forget and one I wish never to replicate.

Whenever I venture outdoors it's almost certain that I have my camera near to hand so I can document our day out with photographs, much to the annoyance of my nearest and dearest. With the introduction of digital photography the cost of my 'hobby' reduced drastically as previously I would be paying to have roll after roll of film developed and printed. I had a long spell of using 35mm slide film as that format gave a better image and the family would gather round for viewing of our latest holiday shots on the projector screen. I still believe it is a better experience to view a slide show on a projector screen than it is to flip through a photo album. Many hours have been spent sorting and scanning all 35 boxes of slides to the PC.

At the last count I have almost 27,000 images and nearly 1000 videos on file, I can remember where each and every one was taken and some of them were taken nearly 30 years ago. The vast majority of the images are mine but some are of my wife's childhood and my grandmothers.

Most of these images in this hub have been modified in some way either by HDR enhancement or sharpening and have been cropped to some extent. i think most of my photo's look a little flat and lacklustre so I have this tendency to enhance them either by using Photoshop or Google's great freeware 'Picasa' I generally tend to give a tight crop and sharpen the image and then add a little saturation, I always believe the colour or vividness in my images never stands out to catch the eye.

At this moment in time I use a Sony Cyber-shot DSC HX5V and I like the GPS image tagger which maps the location of each photo. I also have an Olympus E-400 SLR and a couple of zoom lenses. I prefer to use the Sony Cyber-shot as it delivers really good image quality and can easily be slipped into a pocket. I tend to frown upon cameras that are bulky and hinder my movement, in the past I regularly used SLR's and carried a camera bag everywhere.