This site features really big photos. If you have limited internet data, you should not visit this site and try to load the full-version of any photos. They’ll burn up your data in a hurry. Also, this site is best viewed on a laptop or desktop computer screen. Somewhere within WordPress is a way of seeing how a site looks on a tablet or phone. Guess what? I never check those settings. My new camera exports photos that are more than 7,000 pixels wide. No point in trying to look at something that gigantic on a little phone screen.

No ads, just photos. In other words, I’m not doing photography for the money. Fortunately I’ve got a real job and it lets me have plenty of time to travel around the world and take lots of photos. Notice how there are no social media links on this site? If you know me in real life you already know I don’t do social media. No comments needed on any of the pages. If you know me and feel like commenting, I’m sure you know how to email me. Not keeping track of how many visitors see this site, not doing any search engine optimization, not doing any promoting. Don’t need to. This site is about the photos and the photos are not for me. They’re for you, my friends. I hope you enjoy them.

These photos are not heavily edited because I’m a lazy editor. I don’t like editing photos. You can’t pay me enough to sit around doing lots of edits to every photo. A lot of them are untouched and look exactly like how they were exported from the camera. If I do any edits, I don’t spend more than 15 seconds on a photo. If I have to do anything other than adjust the brightness levels, maybe dim the highlights a bit, and give the contrast and color saturation just a tiny nudge by one step, I just delete the photo because it wasn’t good enough. If you take a good photo to start with, edits are not necessary. I’ve met some people in my travels who spend 30 minutes on each photo making lots of changes. Guess what? That’s no longer a photo. That’s a piece of graphic art once it has been manipulated that much. Take a better photo and save yourself a lot of time.

Not all of my photos are “perfect” which means if you zoom in far enough they won’t be perfectly sharp or in focus. A couple of reasons for that. First, motion. Maybe I wiggled just a little as I took the photo. Out in the field while hiking through forests and trying to get photos of animals, it’s not possible to set up a tripod for every shot. NatGeo and the BBC can do it because they can hang out for a month trying to get one shot. I usually can afford one or two days which means I’m shooting everything from the shoulder. Therefore, body motion can cause motion blur in the photo, especially in low-light conditions.
The second reason is distance. Chances are all of the air between you and the subject of your photo is NOT exactly the same temperature. And that means each time the light passes through a different temperature zone, it will get refracted just a little. Now magnify those minor effects over several hundred meters of distance and add in a lot of heat shimmer in hot environments and you get lots of blur in your photos.
Finally, the third reason is my zoom lens. While it is not professional quality, it still wasn’t cheap. But it’s what I could afford. The pro-version of the lens which is much better quality and therefore makes it easier to get a sharp, focused image costs US$12,000. In all of my travels, I’ve only encountered one photographer with a lens in that price range. And he said it belonged to the company, not to him personally. His office paid for all of the gear whereas I have to pay for all of mine.

A common question: why are your cameras so expensive? Well, this is an expensive hobby. But the main reason I pay for professional-quality cameras and lenses is the quality and durability of their construction. My cameras live a very rough life. They get banged around in all sorts of dusty, dirty locations around the world. Living in my backpack, getting stuffed into overhead bins on airlines or buses, getting bounced around in the back of a truck – it’s not easy. And while there are many cheaper cameras on the market, they don’t survive so well. Canon does a good job of weather-sealing their professional line of cameras to help keep dust and moisture out. Fortunately for me, paying for durability also means getting top optical quality. If you look at a photo taken with a $600 lens and compare it to a photo taken with the same camera body but using a $2,400 lens, you will see a vast difference in quality. Now most people are going to think even $600 is too much for a lens. As I said, it’s an expensive hobby.

Another common question: why do you have two cameras? Well, that goes back to the dust/dirt issue. Way back in 2008 while traveling around Europe I only had a point-and-shoot. It took nice photos but the lens was not wide-angle nor did it have any zoom. If I wanted to get an entire palace in a single shot, I had to zoom with my feet several hundred meters back. And then I wound up with a photo that had a tiny little palace with lots of grass and lots of sky. Back then I promised myself if I could ever go on safari I would buy a real camera and a good lens. And of course on safari, you also need a long lens to get good photos of the animals when they are far away. So at least two lenses.
In 2012 when I started researching my first safari I kept finding all sorts of websites that kept saying you needed to bring at least two camera bodies with you on safari. When I read that I thought they had to be joking. Who besides a paid professional can afford two camera bodies? Kept researching and finally found a website where they explained WHY you need two camera bodies on safari. See, each time you take off your wide-angle lens to switch to your zoom lens, a little bit of dust will get inside the camera body and onto the sensor chip. And that’s if you’re in a clean environment. National parks are not clean environments. The website explained that if you show up with just one camera body, it will be completely dead by the third day of safari because too much dust will get inside and you won’t be able to clean it out. Therefore, I have one camera with a wide-angle lens for landscapes and stuff that is close to me. The other camera has the zoom lens for things that are far away. And that way I never have to take a lens off while out in the field and I have much less risk of damaging the sensors in my cameras.