A Bit About Me

 I have been interested in photography since I was a young boy many decades ago. I had a cheap box camera and would develop photos in an old closet in the basement of my parents house in Courtenay B.C. Back then we used messy chemicals and I created small negative sized contact prints in black and white. Needless to say, digital photography was all thought of as science fiction in those days. We would sometimes hear rumors of the digital technology but never dreamed that it would develop into what we see today. As a young man I upgraded to a film SLR camera which allowed me to gain more knowledge of how exposure and lighting worked in order to get good results. You couldn’t afford to take more than a few pictures at a time as everything was chemical based and very expensive to have developed. Most roles of film were a set ISO in lots of 24 or 36 photographs per role. You had to always make sure that your settings were perfect and that there was something worthwhile to shoot before pressing the shutter button.

There was a period for several years where I did not do photography at all. I spent a lot of time working and involving myself in other pursuits such as amateur radio. This later developed into more modern interests like computers, the Internet, and digital multimedia not to mention getting married and raising a family. It wasn’t until my mid forties when digital photography became more mainstream that I started to get interested in photography once more.

My Equipment – Update 2024/25

So, this year I am continuing my journey with the Sony line of cameras and lenses. I still shoot with the Sony ILCE-1 or “A1” as it is known in our group. I really can’t fault it’s performance and the quality of output. It has forced me to be a somewhat better photographer especially with lighting and being steadier while hand-holding. I love how it sticks to the subject once acquired and the different types of eye AF. Noise can be a concern at higher ISO but most files respond well to third party filtering.

I upgraded from the 200-600mm zoom to the 400mm F/2.8 G-Master prime lens in August of 2022 and have never looked back. The 400mm has proven to be very versatile and allows me to shoot at several different focal lengths with the help of teleconverters. It performs well for perching or flying birds such as medium sized raptors in the winter with either the 1.4X or 2X teleconverters. Just by itself, the 400mm excels at shooting great grey and horned owls in a dark forest or can keep up with speedy hard to shoot subjects such as swallows or pygmy owls anytime.

The Website

When I first started this website it was supposed to be used as a portal for information and events related to our family. However, as more and more people became interested in my photography I decided to dedicate it solely for wildlife photography. Although the content is mainly about avian subjects (birds) there is also some albums for animals and eventually I plan to add albums for trips or perhaps personal events.

Technical Stuff

I started with a traditional layout where each webpage was hard-coded and I would modify templates and add content as needed. I did this for years and it was a lot of work and very cumbersome. Sometime in 2014 I switched everything over to WordPress which is more automatic. WordPress works on a system where everything is held in a database and scripts run to build the web pages on demand. The whole thing is much more customizable and has almost unlimited opportunities as thousands of applications are available to do almost anything you want with your website layout. You can log in and edit from anywhere in the world and your changes are seen by everyone almost immediately.

My photos appear on the website through a special third party application called “Justified Image Grid”. The application updates this website automatically every time I upload a new photo on my Flickr page.  A new thumbnail image is generated here locally which is capable of spawning a larger image in a lightbox.  It also carries over image titles and descriptions from Flickr. This cuts my work in half as regards web publishing and the system works pretty slick!

Thanks for visiting my website. Photos are changed with new additions on a regular basis so I hope to see you back soon!