I started my photographic journey in my early twenties, dabbling with my father’s Minolta SRT-101 camera body and a 50mm f/1.8 lens back in the early 1990s. When I became a certified scuba diver in 1995, my photography interest grew, as I was starting to discover many amazing critters underwater. This brought me to buy my first camera, an amphibious Nikonos IVa body and a 35mm lens with a single Aquasea strobe light.
I immersed myself in the underwater world, where my main focus became the search for and photography of the myriad macro critters underwater around Sydney, Australia. I ended up owning several Nikonos cameras during my diving days and eventually bought more Minolta cameras and some lenses, plus an old Ikelite housing that I had converted to fit one of the old Minolta SLR bodies.
John McConnell, who was the godfather of underwater camera gear in NSW made me a custom bracket to hold two cameras with twin strobes at once. One camera was set to wide angle photography, the second for macro. It was a different world before digital, when this meant I was only able to take no more than 72 images per dive and having to work out exposures with the added difficulty of estimating the distances to the subjects themselves with the rangefinder type camera meant that I’d get half a dozen keeper images at best per dive.
During an April dive in 1997 at my favourite Sydney shore dive, Shark Point, off Clovelly, I photographed a seahorse-like fish, which I was unable to identify from the photographs, as they were not in any of my underwater reference books. This became a source of frustration, but as fate had it, I became acquainted with Mark McGrouther, the then ichthyology collection manager at the Australian Museum. Mark told me that he has never seen a fish like that and it looks like a completely new species. Once I was able to collect a holotype specimen for the experts to study, Melbourne-based ichthyologist, Rudie H. Kuiter, wrote the required scientific paper on the new species of Syngnathid and named it in my honour. The ABC approached me for an interview in early 2003 and the subsequent piece was aired on TV on the 7:30 report with Kerry O’Brien. You can watch the report right here if you wish.
In 2001, I moved to the foot of the Blue Mountains and sadly, my diving days became numbered. The long distances needed to get to a dive site, then feel disappointment if conditions were not great meant that the passion fizzled out and I made my final scuba dive in October 2005 at Kurnell, at The Leap. In the early 2000s, I started to be interested in bird photography and began to participate in online photography forums where I quickly developed a great admiration for photographers like Alan Murphy and and Arthur Morris, two pioneers of modern bird photography. Alan’s work in particular has been very impressive and the way he mastered set-ups and getting birds to come to these set-ups are still prominent in today’s bird photography world. Alan is a true master of bird photography. But in his own way, so is Arthur. My dream to own one of those massive white super telephoto lenses was born. Back then, in 2001, they cost around AUD20,000, so a hell of a lot of money so I dreamt about owning one of those for a long time.
In 2003, I was gifted the Reader’s Digest book of Australian Birds. This house brick sized book soon became my favourite thing to read and I started to acquaint myself with the wonderful birdlife found on the Australian continent. I purchased a more modern Canon SLR body, a fairly cheap zoom lens, a macro lens and started a more serious approach to photographing birds and the macro world around me.
2006 brought the biggest change to my world of photography when I bought my very first DSLR camera, the Canon EOS 30D, barely a week after it got released in Australia. My passion grew even greater and I was out shooting as much as possible (sometimes four to five times a week) from that day in early March when I received my DSLR camera.
I quickly found, that the standard kit zoom lens was a complete waste of time if I wanted to get professional quality images, so I saved up and purchased my first true professional lens, the Canon EF300mm f/4L IS USM lens and two matching teleconverters, the EF1.4xII and EF2.0xII. This changed my world completely and the obsession and hyperfocus to the art of bird photography started to develop even more. I spent every spare moment at Nepean Weir from 2006 October, or around the Castlereagh woodlands and some big properties around there to which I had private access.
In the last 17 years that I’ve made the digital switch, I spent over 10,000 hours in the field using mostly Canon, and now Olympus (aka OM System) gear, with occasionally borrowing Nikon equipment from a couple of friends.
2020 was a turning point in my photography career, as my wife Netra and I changed systems completely after falling in love with the portability and exceptional image quality of the Olympus system. We now shoot with the OM-System (formerly Olympus) and have not regretted the move one bit. I recently calculated the number of digital images captured since 2006 and the cost of processing and film had I have still been using film. Though the costs were not taking inflation into account. I have now shot close to 1.4 million digital frames in the last 17 years that equal approximately 38,000 rolls of film. The cost of which would be in excess of AUD650,000 based on costs of slide film and processing in 2001.
I’ve used many camera bodies and lenses over the years, but have found that the best results are taken with professional grade equipment and they withstand the physical abuse I put them through during my adventures.
