Born and bred in sunny Australia... outback travel is the one thing I miss the most, the things that I saw in 30 odd years of travelling in Australia makes me wish I could start it all over again with a digital camera in hand ...Australia is still one of the world’s richest photographic destinations for any keen digital photographer ...Although Bondi and surrounding beaches I still call home sweet home. I was lucky enough to include photography as one of my elected subjects at high school. Digital photography in those days was but a pipe dream but a hell of a lot of fun taking pictures with film cameras that I now see at car boot and junk fairs . Mixing potions in a darkroom, turning nothing into something I found a fascinating and addictive subject. Some of my fondest memories have been linked to photography in some way or another. From achieving high pass marks in music at school with a series of400mm tele- photopictures of my gay music teacher... on a nudie beach in Sydney harbour ... boyfriend in tow... (really)yes really to selling black and whites taken with a second hand Pentax at Paddington markets for two dollars a pop, then to see them magically appear on a national magazine cover. Yes,... Unfortunately property law was a very different animal back in the 70s.

I think my first serious camera was a Canon EOS 1000 E which my wife took through Africa taking 1347 photos of Elephants ... yes she likes elephants. With little to no use for two years I picked it up again and used it in a purely amateur capacity for almost half a decade. Life and commitment makes you take little funny sidesteps, with engineering being my bread-and-butter, working in everything from the food industry to Americas cup challenges ... Then a new hobby of target shooting, competing at a national level while Renovating a series of houses , photography disappeared off the radar scope for a number of years.

When my firstborn came along I realised that I had no camera to record these precious moments in time. So I went shopping... Film cameras were a thing of the past on high street by this time ... And digital cameras had come out of their infancy so a whopping 3.2 megapixel beast was purchased. To cut to the chase... five years ago my wife who was born in the UK , sadly lost her mother very suddenly prompting her to return to England to spend some quality time with her nemesis... daddy... I was given a choice of going to England with her for four or five years or going with her to the UK for four or five years. The things we do. So I closed down my engineering business, sent the wife back to work, and became a full-time house dad to a 4 and a 7 year old here in the Chilterns UK.

Having built my own high end editing computers over the last decade and photography playing a bigger and bigger part in my life, it naturally became my next insatiable adventure. I do tend to be passionate about anything I throw myself into, although perfectionism can be a double-edged sword. With thousands of hours spent on perfecting skills, gaining critical contacts and cramming every piece of literature I could get my hands on, to get myself back to the level of expertise where I feel comfortable conversing with people in the digital photography field comfortably.

I now find myself being a member of not one but two rather competitive photographic clubs, organising the occasional promotional night targeting software in digital imaging, writing reviews both hardware and software and somewhere in the metamorphic stage of turning from amateur to professional shooting Sony gear. As with all things in life, what track I finally go down will depend on where fate takes me in the next 18 months. So through this blog you can see how I'm going............ and who knows you may be able to even offer me some advice. And yes.......... Being a house dad is one of the hardest jobs I’ve ever done ...There’s no pay ,the hours are crap , the wife has the worst case of pipe and slippers syndrome I've ever heard of.............. but the kids and photography make it all worthwhile...............Aussie Allan.