Also wanted to thank Joe Roback again for making the template (which can be found here) available.

I took the shot above last weekend while at the park with my girlfriend on a glorious evening enjoying a few beers and a couple of burgers made on a little disposable BBQ. I thought that life couldn’t get much better so used my trusty Panasonix Lumix LX3 to capture the moment. I tweaked the shot later that evening in photoshop and when I saw the final version realised that it was probably one my favourite shots that I’ve taken to date.

It made me realise that I spend most of my photographic life trying to find that elusive perfect shot that I’ll finally be happy with. Couple that with the fact that I’ll only pull the trigger on a shot if I think it’s worthwhile (or worthy, if I can say that) and it means that quite often I forget to take these kind of snapshots of moments that involve me and are important to me; rather than shots that I think you (the viewer) will like.

Given the amount of baby and cat pictures on the internet, I’m sure the majority of people don’t need (or want) my words of advice, but I wanted to write this short article to remind people (and myself more than anyone) to take that plain old snapshot which, in years to come, might end up being one of the most precious shots in your archives.

Here’s another couple that always bring a smile to my face when I see them:

This one is of my girlfriend in New York seconds after making her self proclaimed “hilarious” joke. I’ve never seen anyone being so pleased with themselves at having made a crap joke, that I had to capture the moment.

And here’s my little granny sitting at the breakfast table one morning. She saw I had my camera in my hand and thought she would pull some funny faces for me. She looks quite serious but you won’t find a happier 80+ year old than this!

I should probably start by explaining why I’ve put this site together since I already have a photoblog and a portfolio site and it might seem a bit excessive having three separate photography websites now. Well, perhaps it is excessive and I just like to keep myself busy but I do feel that they each have (and will continue to have) quite distinct purposes. My portfolio site has been alive in various different forms for a number of years now and essentially showcases my favourite work whereas my photoblog was created as a means of keeping me clicking away as much as possible (which, overall, has worked!).

My photoblog, which is powered by pixelpost, is very much set up to show off my photographs with the image descriptions being a secondary (perhaps incidental?) function. I do really enjoy writing about my photography – whether it’s explaining what technique I used to capture an image or how I achieved a particular result in photoshop – but feel that it’s perhaps lost on my current photoblog. It’s also so much easier to put posts together using wordpress, which powers this site. Hopefully then the three sites can sit comfortably with each other.

So there we go – hopefully I’ve justified (to myself more than anyone) why I’ve spent my time putting this site together and I’m really hoping that as it grows it will be a useful resource for some of you out there. Just about everything I’ve learned about photography has come from people on the web sharing their knowledge on sites such as dpreview and fujimugs so I know how helpful things like these can be.

I receive quite a lot of emails asking me about particular photos or processing techniques, so if there’s anything you’d like to know about please drop me an email and I’ll try and put something on here to cover it.