Other Interests Page

Hi and thanks for stopping by,

We live in a digital age and, one-by-one, over the years, my interests have all gone digital. Ever since I bought my first computer many years ago I’ve been absorbed in discovering new ways in which they further and promote my interests in Photography/graphics, Amateur Radio and Music. My computer has every-increasingly become my “nerve center” for all my hobbies and interests.

Dexpot – https://dexpot.de/ Rainmeter – https://www.rainmeter.net/ ObjectDock – https://www.stardock.com/products/obj… Voice Attack – https://voiceattack.com/ Rainlendar (Calendar) – https://www.rainlendar.net/cms/index.php

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I’ve been a licensed UK Amateur Radio operator since 1988. I am very limited on antennas in my QTH and use a N9TAX 2/70cm dual band slim jim/j-pole indoor antenna fed from an Icom CS-2730 2M/70cm dual band transceiver. I also occasionally operate handheld mobile on 2M, 6M or 70cm using my Yaesu VX-3 or VX-7 handheld radios and I sometimes frequent the M0HOLY-L HUBnet Echolink node.

I have a DMR Tytera MD-380 rig and DVMega+Bluestack hotspot plus BlueDV software. I operate an Inrico TM-7 network radio on Teamspeak, Zello and Echolink and have it connected to the PC via USB and I’m using an app named Vysor which allows me to remote control the TM-7 and provides a much larger and easier to read screen display.

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I’m also involved with the admin team at the World Hub Teamspeak server. If this is of interest to you please see our Facebook group page at https://www.facebook.com/groups/1735844266724626 for the latest information.

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Last but by no means least, another of my long term passions is playing the drums. Music has played a huge part of my life. I got my first drum kit in my teens and played with several local bands.

A while back I got a very basic digital kit and an Alesis PERCPAD which I use with a Midiman MIDI interface triggering EZ-Drummer 2 software and for recording Reaper digital audio workstation software, Virtual Audio Cable, Voice Meeter Banana Virtual Audio Mixer, ASIO4ALL low latency codec, LoopBe1 virtual midi port plus eDrum midi mapper (pad re-mapping) and VUMeter software.

Nowadays I just play for relaxation, to escape life’s stresses, to “keep my hand in” and occasionally I’m asked to record a drum track for some of my musician friends.

travel

Not much of a surprise this one, I love to travel or, to put it more accurately, I love to explore different countries and cities. I’ve long-since lost the thrill of air travel, hours cramped up in economy class with one’s knees around one’s neck, all the hassle of checking in two hours before flying and flight delays etc. and my preferred method of travelling is now by train whenever practical. I have an ambition to travel on the Orient Express as I just love the Art Deco period and the romance of travelling on such a beautiful, historical train. I never had a holiday until I was 17, ever since then I guess that I’ve been making up for lost time. 🙂

The magic begins on arrival, there’s always so much to explore. I’ve been lucky and visited many beautiful and interesting locations and my memories are, quite literally, priceless. I’ve always found people to be fundamentally the same wherever I’ve gone, yes, there are of course cultural differences, that’s a big part of the enjoyment, but everyone has, broadly-speaking the same hopes, fears, joys and worries the World-over and I’ve found that a smile and a friendly gesture is pretty much a universal language.

Although born, raised and educated in the U.K I don’t consider myself as particularly “British”, instead I prefer to think of myself as a citizen of the World. I detest all forms of nationalism, jingoism, racism and sexual or religious intolerance which I find totally repugnant and arrogant in the extreme,as the French idiom goes “Vive la difference”!.

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A small selection of my travel works:

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Pontikonisi Corfu, Greece

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Piazza del Popolo, Rome, Italy

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Little Town, Prague, Czech Republic

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Grande Place, Brussels, Belgium

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Marsaxlokk, Malta

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Closer to home: Richmond Bridge on the River Thames

As I sit here looking at my modern digital cameras I’m reminded of my first camera and, in particular, the first photograph that I ever took. Nowadays we take cameras and camera technology pretty much for granted but when I was a child I can’t remember many photographs. The only time our camera saw the light of day, and it had to be the light of day, as there wasn’t a flash, was on a few family occasions, the usual thing, school sports days, birthdays, etc.. My interest in photography didn’t start until my grandfather “loaned” me his camera to take with me on a week-long school trip, sleeping under canvas, in Snowdonia, North Wales. It was a somewhat battered old twin-lens reflex camera in which one looked downwards in to the viewfinder when taking a photograph.

I remember being very excited at being entrusted with the family camera, film wasn’t cheap and I had very little to no idea how to use it. The experience must have made some kind of impression on me as, after all these years, I still remember taking my first photograph. The coach stopped en-route at Blenheim Palace, the ancestral home of Sir Winston Churchill and it became the subject of my first photograph. Although, sadly, like my other photographs from the trip, it has long since disappeared, however, I really don’t need the photograph to remind me as the experience is indelibly etched on my mind. I wonder if this is perhaps where my interest in landscape photography stems from but that’s probably too much of an assumption. As far as I remember I was the only kid on the trip to have a camera, that’s how different things were, nowadays, just about everyone has a camera of some sort built in to their mobile phones. It also taught me to be disciplined to the point of being frugal when taking photographs as the trip was for one week and I only had a 12 exposure black and white film in the camera.

Some years later I really got the photography bug and bought my first camera, an Olympus OM-1 35 mm film camera and I went on to own their OM-2 and OM-4ti cameras and a range of lenses. Film was still pretty expensive considering I earned about £20 a week in my first job so I got in to developing and printing my own black and white and, later, colour films to help keep the costs down and make things more affordable. Not only did this experience teach me an awful lot about image-making start to finish, many of the techniques and skills that I learned in my makeshift darkroom, a small room adorned with genuine World War 2 blackout curtains fitted to keep out the light, another hand-me-down from my grandfather, these skills would re-surface and be invaluable some years later when I started working on processing my digital images.

I put myself through University as a mature student and I badly needed the money so I had to very reluctantly part with all my photographic equipment, but needs must. After I graduated I bought my first digital camera, a small fixed lens Kodak compact camera, reduced in a sale. It had, by today’s standards, a laughably small maximum image resolution of 640×480 pixels or, to put it another way, a stunning 0.4 Megapixels!. For all of this and further equipped with screw on wide angle and telephoto lens attachments, it proved to be a fabulous little camera which I took all over the place with me. Put simply, digital photography was a revelation, to me, no requirement for film, no real running costs and a lot of image capacity on a small memory card which I found absolutely liberating.

A few years before that I had discovered some free graphics editing software on the cover disk of a computer magazine and that started off my real passion for working with graphics and, ultimately, photo processing. So I then had all the tools I required to develop, pun intended and further, my interest in digital photography. Processing is where the magic starts for me, I am totally absorbed in and fascinated by the range of options that digital processing affords me. It encourages me, if, that is, I ever need encouragement, to constantly experiment with new styles, new techniques and is such an important part of my enjoyment and interest in photography.

I went on to own several DSLRs but, as I got older I began to find that they were simply too heavy and bulky. I switched over a few years ago to Micro Four Thirds cameras and lenses. My choice of MFT system was heavily influenced by my experiences with my Olympus film cameras, maybe it was, in truth, part based on nostalgia that I decided on their OM-D system. As a landscape/travel photographer I have to carry my gear around all day and the weight and bulk saving is highly significant. I’ve been very impressed with the image quality of my Micro Four Thirds equipment, it has traveled with me extensively, never let me down and I have never had cause to question my decision to go over to that format.

So my 50 year photographic adventure has led me from twin-lens reflex and single-lens reflex film cameras to digital cameras, from stumbling around in a dimly-lit darkroom to working with my images on my computer. I’ve heard it said on occasions, including a comment I read some while back by a very famous photographer, that cameras being so much an every-day item now and available in mobile phones etc. devalues photography. I feel quite the opposite, I firmly believe that it empowers everyone with affordable technology to take photographs and enjoy photography and that, in my opinion, is fantastic. Although I’ve very much enjoyed my personal photographic journey I do confess to feeling a slight tinge of regret that the technology wasn’t available when I started out but one can’t put the clock back and I intend to keep on embracing all these great technological advancements, experimenting and enjoying my work.

Cameras:

Olympus: OM-D E-M5 Mk II (titanium) & HLD-8G grip, OM-D E-M1 Mk I (black) & HDL-7 grip, OM-D EM-5 Mk I (silver) & HDL-6 grip, PEN EPL-5, PEN EP-5 (silver) +VF-4 Tough TG-5 (red), PEN-F (silver), Canon Powershot G10, Nikon Coolpix A100

Lenses:

Olympus: M.Zuiko: 12 mm f/2, 17 mm f/1.8, 25 mm f/1.8, 45 mm f/1.8, 30 mm f/3.5 macro, 9 mm f/8 body cap fisheye, 15 mm f/8 body cap, 9-18 mm, 12-50 mm, 12-40 mm f/2.8 PRO, 14-150 mm II, 40-150 mm II, MCON-P02.

Sigma: ART 60 mm f/2.8.

Samyang: Manual focus 7.5 mm f/3.5 fisheye.

TT Artisan: Manual focus 17mm f/1.4, 35mm f/1.4.

Panasonic Lumix: 14 mm f/2.5, 20 mm f/1.7, 12-32 mm x2 (black and silver), 12-60 mm, 14-42 mm II, 35-100 mm.

PEN E-P5, 9-18mm,12-32mm, 40-150mm II. A lightweight kit with virtually continuous coverage from 18mm wide angle to 300mm telephoto.

OM-D E-M1 I, 14-150mm II, 12-40mm PRO. . Heavier than my other kits but with complete weather-sealing. Coverage from 24mm wide angle to 300mm telephoto with some overlap for backup.

OM-D E-M5 II, 17mm, 35mm, 12-60mm. A balance of two fun manual focus lenses with a weather-sealed body and zoom lens.

PEN E-PL5, 9mm, 15mm, 25mm, 60mm, 12-50mm. Another lightweight fun kit with a zoom option.

TG-5, OM-D E-M5 mk1, 7.5mm, 12mm, 17mm, 45mm, 30mm macro. M-CON.

PEN-F, 14mm, 20mm, 12-32mm, 35-100mm. Probably my favourite lightweight day-to-day kit. Two fast primes and two zoom with almost continuous coverage from 24mm wide angle through to 200mm telephoto.

Software:

Corel: Paintshop Pro Elite 2020 & Video Studio 2019.

Skylum Software: Aurora HDR 2019, Luminar 4 and Luminar AI.

DXO Labs: PhotoLab 4 Elite, Viewpoint 3, NIK Collection 4, Film Pack 5 and PureRAW.

Anthropics Technologies: Landscape Pro Studio 3 and Portrait Pro.

EyeQ: Perfectly Clear

Topaz Labs: Studio 2, Sharpen AI, A.I Gigapixel, AI Clear, AI Adjust, DeNoise AI and Various legacy plugins.

Adobe: Lightroom.

GreenScreenWizard Studio Pro.

Serif: Affinity Photo

Microsoft: Image Composite Editor (Free).

Darktable (Free).

Olympus: Olympus Capture, Olympus Workspace and Olympus Webcam (Free to Olympus owners).

Sony: Movie Studio Platinum.

Lighting Gear:

Godox TT350o flash, Godox X1T radio flash trigger, LED ring flash, GVM RGB LED light, Olympus MAL-1 Macro Arm Light. Two Godox LED36 lights. Three Bowen studio flash heads, barndoors, honeycombes, umbrellas and flash meter.