In 1999 I went to the Pacific Northwest with my olde (once-)reliable Kodak film camera. When I got back with the "can never be reproduced" memories of that trip, a friend said "You need a new camera". (She was right. I don't know whether the lens had degraded or what it was, but they were pretty bad.) In the very early 2000s I recall buying a 1.3 megapixel (wow!) digital camera which may have been an Olympus, in an interesting piece of foreshadowing. It was only in 2004 that I got serious about photography with the purchase of a Canon EOS 300D. It was only in 2006 that I got even more serious and bought a pro level lens (the Canon 24-105 f/4L). I created an account on PBase to display my photos the following year, as well as changing my workhorse camera to the Canon 40D. In 2013 my main Canon lens died and I moved to the much more compact Olympus OMD range, which lets me carry a camera more easily. As of 2024, I'm still with (what is now) OM Systems gear.

PBase reliability became really bad in the early 2010s, and I tried making a jump to SmugMug. (Bad decision. SmugMug is like a secret society. Nobody sees your photos unless they're (a) paying members and (b) you're part of a clique.) I still stayed on PBase, and had been watermarking my photos with my PBase address, but PBase is run by a couple who no longer seem to care less about the site. It's shedding members at a prodigious rate. In my opinion its implosion is "when", not "if". I therefore opened an account with Flickr. (Which was then owned by Yahoo and later bought by SmugMug, so you can imagine how cheered I was about that, not.) But now, I'm watermarking everything with my personal web site so that no matter where the photos are hosted, they point back there. (Converting the old PBase photos is taking a horrendous amount of time (which I don't have). However because of the stupid default display method on Flickr being the idiotic-as-a-concept "Photostream", which just displays photos in the order that they're loaded, I don't want to load to Flickr until I can do it an entire gallery at a time. If a series of photos tell a story, Photostream takes all of the words of a novel and sticks them in a blender.)

There isn't much on my web site, but I did put up a "sample box" of photos, one per year, which charted my life and photography experience from about 35,000 feet up. And now, it's here too.

These aren't necessarily the best shot I took that year, but they tell a story of how my photography style and interests have changed over time. Where possible I use locations which were either unique to that year, or reflect some specific trend from the year.

(Yet somehow Canberra has (so far) been missed despite it being a prominent destination for me for several years.)

The most recent update was on 01 September 2024 with an image from 2018... so there is some catching up to do. But hey, that's also part of my photographic journey.