Biography I live in beautiful North Wales, close to the coast and the wonderful Snowdonia National Park. I have recently given up my employment with a major IT service company, to follow my two burning passions Natural History and Photography. As a former IT specialist I am also able to offer specialist services ranging from colour calibration and bespoke photoshop training through to pc maintenance, file recovery and complete workstation build services.
My interest in wildlife started at a very young age, despite being brought up in a town, my friend and I used to spend hours investigating the birds and other wildlife that inhabited the railway line and overgrown sidings at the rear of his house and my love of birds and wildlife still exists to this day. Most of my wildlife viewing has been restricted to the UK though I have been fortunate enough to fulfil my ambition of going on safari twice in the last two years, something I am totally hooked on and hope to repeat as funds allow.
I have always marvelled at the work of photographers like Eric Hosking and Heather Angel. My own passion for taking photographs started when I was 19, when I was able to afford my first SLR camera, a Zenith. Though a cheap totally manual SLR camera it was on this that I learned the nuances such as depth of field that are sometimes forgotten with the new fully automated cameras of today. Don't get me wrong, I am upto date with the modern day gadgets of today, I now shoot totally with digital SLR equipment, but I believe my grounding using the old Zenith has helped me appreciate more fully what and how image are created. For more about my equipment and reviews of this see the link to my equipment page.
As I said above I shoot totally with digital camera equipment now, but whilst I marvel at the capabilities of software editing programs, I tend to limit my own use of such programs to cropping and resizing images, adding a little colour saturation and the odd straightening of a skewed horizon if I had one to many wines the night before. I have also on occasion carried out some photo restoration work for others from scanned photos that may have seen better days, or people just want resizing.
I have been a member of Conwy Camera Club for the last three years, which I have found of massive benefit, not only from a learning point of view but from the friends I have made there. I servcd as Competition Secretary, Vice Chair and this year was elected as the Chairman. For the last 2 years following requests for assistance from other members I started a digital group, this we hold as a self help training session fortnightly on a Thursday evening.
