An About Me page is probably the hardest page to write for a website but damn everyone needs one so here goes…

Personal:

• I’m an Irish student studying mechanical engineering. Been at it 8 years and it’s still going strong! Engineering is only my day job however; everyone has their hobbies, and on top of rock climbing, reading, Xbox 360-ing, and travelling, mine is running around with my D300 annoying anyone unfortunate enough to get between my lens and my subject! I became interested in photography once I realised that the possible variety of subjects are endless: people, places, plants, animals, nooks, crannies, the sky, the ground, buildings, vehicles, ruins, sports, bells, whistles… you get the idea. Creating a photo using Photomatic or HDR Max that almost jumps at you from your computer is a constant pleasure for me.

Equipment:

• My first camera was a Cannon A400 Powershot. At the time I wasn’t very interested in photography and bought it merely to grab the odd holiday / concert photo.
• Soon after though my interest grew and because I was heading to Corfu for a few days I decided to buy a bridge camera - not so good as a DSLR but within my price range. I settled for a Finepix S9600 due to its large 10.7x optical zoom (28-300mm 35mm eqiuivalent). I’ve had it since April 2007 and I’ve enjoyed experimenting with it - it introduced me to RAW imagery, as I’d only really known about the A400 jpgs before that. 18 months later and I find myself wanting to upgrade to a DSLR; the S9600 does not support autobracketing of RAW images (it does for jpgs but I’ve ben put off using it purely because it doesn’t support RAW). Also for a camera with such a large optical zoom it has no image stablisation technology!
• I’ve just bought a Nikon D300 with the 18 - 200mm Nikkor VR lens (October 2008). It’s pretty brilliant, is much heavier than the S9600, and has about 19000 options in it.