I have been using my camera a little bit the last few months, mainly in the garden for that wonderful transition from Winter, to Spring into Summer.

I’ve been lucky to have an amazing variety of birds in my backyard recently…

So I have been incredibly slack with my own website for the last… oh, year or so. Actually, its been a case of camera-lazy, not website-lazy.

A couple of months back on a bright, sunny & chilly morning I was lucky enough to lose my copter-ginity, going up in a helicopter with the side door removed to photograph the new Specialist Medical Centre on the south side of Coffs Harbour.

I thought my face was going to split I was smiling that hard as the helicopter took off. Harnessed in and half hanging out the side of the chopper, we spent about 10 minutes or so circling the building, giving me an opportunity to get the building and surrounding areas.

This was followed up with some ground-level shots and architectural details.

I got to meet my friend’s little daughter Kaliyah the other day, I tried to keep up as she tore up the playground

So it seems it has been quite a while since I posted images on my own site… I guess my laziness got away from me. The last few months; a couple of litters of pups, some flowers, a cat and my great-gran turning 100.

I have been going through a Black & White phase lately and just bought a Lomo plastic lens for my Nikon DLSR, so that should be fun to play with.

Had my great-grandmother not been born 100 years ago, I would not be here… nor would my grandmother, my father or my brothers. To think what she has seen in the last 100 years; 2 world wars, the development of the modern car, the technological revolution, racial integration, a migration from Scotland to Australia with multiple generations… a remarkable life indeed.

 Photo credits to my mum (absent due to camera shyness) on this one Dad posing as Earl Hicky = GOLD!

Pure bred Japanese Spitz pups…. so adorable and so young, 10 days old.

Quite a large cloud cluster appeared off the coast last night around sunset. It then turned into quite a spectacular lightning storm…

Roughly a year ago, I set out to create a massive image to occupy a large blank wall space. I wanted it to be something different from just 1 static image printed really large; enter the large-scale mosaic.

The mosaic’s starting point was this image

It was cropped & colours tweaked slightly. I then selected 300 of my favourite photos, which were fed into a mosaic creator along with the altered lantana image. The mosaic creator churned out the following map, 300 cells in total; 30 cells across by 10 cells high, measuring 3 metres wide and 75cm high.

Rather than just printing that as 1 large image (3 metres x 75cm), I printed 150 individual 6″x4″ prints. Each 6″x4″ was then cut in half, resulting in my 300 cells.

I then created a large polystyrene board and set about pinning down each of the 300 images; 4 pins an image meant 1200 pins all up.

The end result:

Time spent all up including creating the mosaic map and pinning: circa 11 hours.

After a number of false starts, I have my website back up and running.

I have an image gallery, with my whole catalogue of images from the last 8 years or so. Coming soon is a print gallery; where you will be able to buy my images as prints or canvas.

Images are also broken up into various categories, with some images cross-pollinating a few categories. It has been a mammoth task in itself just getting the 580-odd images uploaded and inserted into the site, but well worth the effort.