Welcome!

G'day there.

A while back, I purchased a Nikon D40 DSLR. It was primarily to be used for astronomy alongside a couple of telescopes that I own, and since owning it I have taken some decent photos of various astronomical objects. You can see them on my astronomy blog.

However, the Nikon D40 is a lovely camera and worthy of much greater use than just dim, fuzzy objects up in the heavens. I have taken the camera to many different events, have shot various types of subjects ranging from miniscule insects, aircraft at airshows and massive lightning storms. In every single scenario, the Nikon D40 has exceeded my expectations.

Recently I have been taking photography more seriously. While my images are not of the artsy-fartsy kind at this point, I sometimes feel the need to experiment with images. Most of the time, however, I feel that things in nature, people, or events simply need to represented as they are, without twisting, distorting or enhancing the images. Sure, a little bit of sharpening, maybe a bit of color enhancement through saturation and other such mild image manipulation is needed to turn a good photo into a great one, but overdoing it seems silly to me. Each to their own!

I would like to become more involved with photography surrounding intense human situations. I have long been interested in war photojournalism (which as my original career interest until I got married and had children), and have long been a fan of the likes of Don McCullin, James Nachtwey and the like. Despite video footage of conflicts around the round (and for that matter, other human, historical events) I still think that the still image can say so much more, if executed well. I doubt I'll get that far into it, but would hopefully one day go and shoot some sort of political or social occurence. Right now I mostly shoot the typical stuff, so maybe this blog will help steer me in a new direction...

So, in this blog I will share some of my images and hopefully some other folks will get some enjoyment out of them. Feel free to leave comments, especially recommendations for improvement!

Cheers,
Phil