I am a father of two, living in West Yorkshire. Over the years, I have found equal enjoyment in creating art work, photography and drone footage.
I subscribed to Adobe to use Lightroom for my photo editing, I was surprised to find that it included Adobe Portfolio (this website). Naturally, this provided a decent base for me to document my ventures.
You won't find anything ground breaking here, the page is merely an outlet for me to document my videos, photos and art - I am an absolute amateur in all those fields.
I began drawing around 15 years ago. In the beginning I really couldn't draw anything. This isn't one of those annoyingly modest comments you hear from someone who has just created a masterpiece... I really couldn't. Through hours of botched attempts, I managed to produce some almost recognisable portraits of famous people.
I have added my earliest drawings to my art page as a reference to show the development over the years. They are slightly awkward for me to look at now, but it allows me to improve on the mistakes I made at first.
I really do have a love hate relationship with drawing. I frequently go years between picking up my pencil. I'm determined to begin another portrait, having thoroughly enjoyed my my most recent one (Salvador Dali). In the future, I may possibly get set up for doing digital art work, also I'd like to learn oil painting.
In November 2021, I picked up my first set of watercolours. Inspired by the amazing progress my father had during his recent venture into painting in watercolour, I decided to make my first attempts. I find watercolour a very unusual medium, in particular I find accuracy very difficult. However, freeing myself from the constraints of precision has allowed me to be far more expressive and impressionistic with my approach. Please have a look at my watercolours on my art page, hopefully there will be an obvious progression from my first attempts.
I have recently added a digital art / AI section to show some of my recent creations, using algorithms, digital manipulation etc.
I bought a Mavic Mini 2 during lockdown 2020/21. It had been something I had thought about for a long long time. I made the leap having watched several YouTube videos of the Magic Mini 2. That particular drone model is easy to use and produces really good footage. I currently have an Apple MacBook Air (2017), in reality I need a new, faster laptop to cope with the video editing. I used DaVinci Resolve and found it somewhat complicated for what I was doing. I use the very amateur program iMovie for most of my editing. What iMovie makes simple, it is invariably lacking any any intermediate or advanced features. I have recently started using Adobe Premiere Rush which is similar to iMovie in many ways. The videos you see on my drone page / YouTube are the best I can manage at the moment with the limitations in hardware for processing.
After years of taking photos on my iPhone, I found that the images were good, but would likely be greater with better hardware. I had thought for years about buying a DSLR, but had never talked myself into it. During 2021 I eventually did talk myself into it and went with a Canon M50. Getting used to so many settings was a boggle at first, having come from the lazy luxury of an iPhone which does everything automatically. Once I had got to grips with the basics of the camera I was free to think more about light, composition etc. The camera came with a 'kit lens' which is good, however, in the hunt for background blur (bokeh) I purchased a Canon 50mm f1.8 lens (nifty fifty). Once I started to use the 50mm I found it so much more creative and pleasing. What I love almost as much as taking the photos, is editing them. The RAW images that the camera produces gives you so much detail to play with to get the desired outcome. I began using Luminar AI and then moved onto Adobe Lightroom. Luminar AI has served me very well, however, the lack of templates etc when compared to Lightroom is vast. Over the hours spent editing hundreds of photos, I have realised that photography is art, and like all art it is subjective.
There are a fair few social media platforms that I have never clicked with such as snapchat / twitter. There are others that while I may have an account I very rarely use such as Instagram. I first set up Instagram with a view that it would be a good platform for putting photos on, however, I just found the picture size format and other features pretty restrictive. My TikTok account is really just for posting guitar bits and bobs.
- Canon M50 Mirrorless DSLR
- Canon 18-45mm lens
- Canon 50mm f1.8 lens
- Movo camera sling strap
- DJI Mavic Mini 2
- ND filters
- Windsor & Newton watercolour paints
- Graded graphite pencils
- Charcoal pencils
- Hard & cold pressed 100% cotton watercolour paper from various manufacturers
- Various brushes including Hake brushes
- Skylum Luminar AI
- Adobe Lightroom
- DaVinci Resolve
- iMovie
- PowerDirector 365
- Adobe Premiere Rush
- Samyang 85mm f1.4 EF lens
- Possibly a full frame camera
- Macbook Pro
- Photo session in a rainy neon soaked street
- To start oil painting
