The end of an era...and the beginning of the new

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In March 2018, after almost 9 years in the full time role of "Executive Officer" of the Australian Institute of Professional Photography (AIPP), it was time for me to leave and move on to something new...

The "something new" has yet to be finalised, but the 2 months of "working from home" whilst I worked my notice period at least gave me the chance to reinvigorate my love of photography, to review my own personal photography catalogue with literally thousands of images I have taken over the years, and to assess how, why and where I store, backup, use and publish my photos.

Just to clarify...whilst I was the E.O. of the AIPP, I was not, and never have been a "professional photographer". In fact the definition of what constitutes a "professional photographer" is a debate for a whole other series of blog posts!

I am just a keen amateur photographer. I take photos purely for my own pleasure, and along my life journey I happened to stumble into the world of "professional photography", a role that consumed me, gave me a whole new understanding of people and photographers in particular...and almost extinguished my love of photography per se...almost, but not quite!

Over the last couple of months I have bought myself a Sony RX1Rii mirrorless system, and a Fuji XPRO 2 mirrorless system.

I have, of course, kept my Nikon D800 system, but I was quite keen to use these new lightweight, high quality mirrorless systems, especially for the upcoming travel I have planned.

I will explain the reasons for these choices, and my thoughts on the systems, in a later post.


In the meantime, I have re-educated myself with the Adobe Lightroom and its new features, had a epic battle (which I lost!) with Google Photos and its strange logic, and quietly introduced myself to the excellent capabilities of iPhone photography, and the wonders of the iPhoneX.


I was especially interested to understand the iPhone and its capabilities with "computational photography", all of which I have steadfastly ignored over the last 9 years.

My early experiments with this fabulous phone and the wonderful camera APP, and even more wonderful "Halide" camera app are very encouraging...more to come.




I also took the opportunity to review my dormant Smug Mug website and to re engineer and republish the site.This is essentially now just a personal website to store and display not only my photos, but also the many excellent photos taken by (and featuring) my lovely wife, Jill.


The posts which follow will give an insight into the last few months, and hopefully will lead to more and better photography...and if that happens I will be very pleased :)😁


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