Photography

Dad

My Dad was a shutterbug. On family holidays driving around Connemara Dad was always stopping the car and getting the SLR (and separate light meter) out to capture the Twelve Bens or Roundstone Bog. This drove my Mum nuts. But I guess it must have made an impression on me, sitting in the back of our Vauxhall Viva, watching him walk along some narrow country road setting up his shots.

He collected those great old Time Life books, which I've still got at home. In 1987 Dad gave me his Kepcor SLR which started a great love affair with 35mm photography which lasted about 8 years. During that time I did two photography courses: in 1990 - '91, a one-year course under Joe Sterling, which was great, and from '91 - '94 a 3 year course in DIT Kevin St. I never finished the DIT course for several reasons, not the least of which was the fact that the looming digital photography revolution was going to render obsolete everything we'd learned about stop bath, ambient fog, and fibre-based printing very soon.

Connemara.net

One of the first things I did on my site about Connemara was to set up a photography section. Originally, I used my own photos, but when I moved to Australia that had to change so I allowed other people to upload their photos to the site. That lasted a while, but things were changing on the web at large that eventually meant that people were more inclined to put their photos on Flickr or Facebook.

Flickr

For all my interest in photography over the years I'd been slow to get into Flickr, possibly because I had my own site all these years which is where I stuck any photos I wanted online. But the pressures of sharing photos of the kids and holidays with my Mum and family mean that it had to happen. Since then I've found it a very effective medium for rubbing my friends' faces in the fact that I'm on a Greek island.