UPDATE 2005: My darkroom WAS semi-digital and some details are below. Since this page was written I have acquired a Canon 300D, a few lenses, PTGui, Panotools and Enblend and upgraded Photoshop. So I am now fully digital. For the most part I shoot in jpg, but occasionally use RAW which I was processing with the (painful) Canon software. I nearly bought C1 but was put off by Capture 1's elitist, unhelpful (and expensive) approach.I wasn't really happy with any of the alternatives so nothing happened on the RAW processing front... intil now. It seems my prayers have been answered with the release of Pixmantec Rawshooter Essentials 2005 which at the time of writing (April 2005) was available on free download. More soon.

July 2001:

My darkroom is semi-digital; I use mostly negative film in my trusty Nikon FE2 which is scanned on an aging Nikon LS2000 filmscanner (using NikonScan 3.1 software or Vuescan), then imported into Photoshop 5.5.

I have always been happy with the camera. The scanner ... weeeell, for the most part it is a good piece of equipment and produces scans that are much better than, for example, the HP S20 that I started out with. But I have never been content with the focus and depth of field on the Nikon machine. Apparently this is a common "design difficulty" with the Nikon filmscanners, known by just about everyone except Nikon. See LS2000 focus problems for a description of the problem, and some measurements I made to quantify the error.

If I were starting again, I would definitely buy a scanner with 4000dpi resolution because of the horrible aliasing you get sometimes (on some films, in fact) with the Nikons at 2700dpi. (A bit more on grain aliasing here).

I've also included a page on how to adjust your monitor and my simplest useful tool, a couple of pixel rulers that help with checking sizes of your web page columns, images or window sizes.

My choice of subject is broad and the technical quality is similarly variable. Many are glorified snaps which appeal to me for reasons other than technical excellence — humour, feeling, atmosphere — the usual sort of thing. (Actually it is often that special joy of capturing my very own 'frozen moment', although I think a slightly more famous photographer owns the rights to that phrase).

In the photo gallery are around a hundred photos arranged into 8 or so categories.

One of my enthusiasms is the "poor man's panorama camera" which consists of me taking numerous shots of an expansive scene on my 35mm camera, and then spending days joining them up in Photoshop. You can see a couple of examples at panoramas.

Street photography is another enthusiasm, although not the "traditional" black and white film with minimal cropping or correction. I like my colour, and I like to make the most of whatever it was I saw or thought I saw when I took the photo. So while some of my images are natural, others are unsubtly manipulated.

Also animals, people, the Australian outback and more - when I get round to it.