A life long Sydney-sider, I have been taking photographs for nearly 40 years, starting off on land my first subjects included Formula 1 bikes and cars before moving to the more challenging birds, landscapes, and macro as well as dabbling in astro photography many years ago.
I'm self taught in photography and also have been heavily using Photoshop for 20+ years, initially with scanned film and then digital imaging. I had a colour darkroom back in the film days and moved onto inkjet printers with fully colour managed workflows 20 years ago.
Underwater shooting came later in the piece and I started off with an Olympus EM-5 MkII after experiencing the UW world snorkeling in the Galapagos with an action camera. I live in Helensburgh to the south of Sydney a short drive from some really nice dive sites. I learned to dive in Sydney which is blessed with some of the best diving available in a capital city anywhere in the world, with shore dive accessible rocky reefs around the entrance to Sydney harbour and Botany Bay and with offshore reefs and shipwrecks as well.
Sydney shore diving is good training dealing with steep descents to the entry point, swells, variable and sometimes quite limited visibility, it really sets you up well to dive near anywhere and has plenty of unique creatures to find such as weedy sea dragons and giant cuttlefish.
Much of my diving is local and I dive a few times a month on average, all year round, I dive dry for about 5 months of the year and a wetsuit the rest of the time.
I'm a Chemical Engineer by training so doing calculations and such comes naturally and helps me a lot in understanding optics and sorting out port charts and other issues that come up with underwater photography. I've also done a lot of mechanical work over time, fixing cars, including a complete engine re-build many years ago. I also build all my own computers and have done since my first PC many years back now. All handy skills when dealing with underwater photo gear and processing underwater images.
I now shoot m43 cameras currently the EM-1 MkII and soon moving to the OM-1 underwater in Nauticam housings and have now mostly switched to them from Canon cameras for my terrestrial work, particularly when travelling. I find the cameras and sensors are good enough for the photography that I do and the range of lenses available really is complete. For macro work above and below water I find they really are unbeatable.
I joined Wetpixel in 2016 and quickly became a regular and was asked to be a moderator in 2020, I found it incredibly useful and greatly enjoy helping people out with underwater photography issues.
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