Photographer.Artist.Astronomer.Scientist

I shoot with a variety of cameras, including a wooden pinhole, a manual classic Nikon, a fancy new Nikon digital, and more besides. Have recently been leaning more strongly towards monochrome / black & white.

The "film" vs "digital" debate really bores me, one isn't better than other, merely different. I embrace all mediums / technologies new & old, since it is the images you produce that matter, not the technology used to produce them. Or to put it another way, buying a newer, fancier camera doesn't make the photos any better !

Some of the best advice I read / heard, was to print out your favourite images and put them up on display somewhere you'll be on a frequent basis (a wall behind your desk/in your office). Viewing them daily, your mind will consciously & subconsciously analyse & critique them, in the process learning more about what makes for a good image. I've been surprised how images I loved at first glance don't have lasting impact, while others have provided constant gratification.

I'm passionate about open source software and attempt to use it for everything I do. There is life beyond PhotoShop, and its called The Gimp. It is responsible for the processing of every image in my profile. The only place where I bend the rules is for film/slide scanning, where I have to resort to VueScan in order to get Infrared cleaning. One day soon the open source SANE will replace this too. I work on Entangle (entangle-photo.org) a project for controlling digital SLRs from a computer running Linux