I originally come from Bristol in the south west of the UK, but now live in a village just outside of nearby Bath.

 

IMAGE USE

 

I'm very happy for my images to be used for any non-commercial stuff (apart from the family and friends point below). I've had problems in the past locating pictures for posters I do for a local nature reserve I belong to, plus It's always an honour if people want to use my images!

 

Now that I've discovered Creative Commons on Flickr I've changed the license on my images to Attribution Non-Commercial. I couldn't understand why I'd never heard of Creative Commons on the internet before (I didn't even know what the term meant originally) and I've searched dozens of times for internet images I could use for free on our posters, Creative Commons should definitely be advertised on the internet a lot more!

 

Anyway, if you do want to use any, it would be really nice just for my curiosity if you could just put a comment on any pics you use to identify them, as I would love to know which ones people like!

 

The only requirement I will make is that on a very tiny minority of the images I have family or friends in the shot, so for their privacy would ask for you not to use them.

 

GENERAL INFO

 

I love photographing anything to do with nature and occasionally astronomy - sadly my telescope isn't designed to use with a digital camera, but I have had a few attempts! I like to photograph any wildlife, plants and insects that we get in the garden, and we have bird feeders which attract a wide variety of birds. I've also got a pond with goldfish, loads of frogs, snails and various other creatures too, which are always great to shoot. I like to go and visit any scenic places around my local area as well, always packing the camera of course.

 

CAMERAS

 

My first decent camera was a Kodak Easyshare C310, which while being quite basic, captured really great colour images which I loved. I also added a bit of a homemade macro lens to the front of the camera with blue-tac to try and take some macro shots. They turned out pretty well, but the depth of field was very narrow. My brother now has this camera.

 

I now have a Canon Powershot S3 IS, and a Panasonic Lumix FZ20. They are both great with a 12x optically stabilised zoom. They both have different strengths for different situations I've discovered.

 

The Panasonic handles high contrast shots far better than the Canon I've found, ie. mountain/shadow shots or wedding pics with the white dress/dark suit combination. It's also slightly better at finding auto-focus in difficult situations.

 

The Canon has a great macro though, which lets you touch the lens against the subject amazingly. The Panasonic macro is also great but has a 5cm minimum. Also with the Canon you can do a 12x zoom shot one metre away, whereas it's two metres minimum at 12x with the Panasonic. Which means with the Canon you get larger butterfly shots!

So two great cameras with different strengths and weaknesses.

  

I have a facebook page, the link is: www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=649911282&ref=profile