About Me
I first started taking an interest in nature, long before I ever pointed a camera at anything. I was one of those rather strange kids that spent many hours running around with a butterfly net and concocting various types of traps in an effort to catch animals. Of course they never worked. Probably just as well!
When I was about 14 my uncle, who was a mad keen photographer, introduced me to cameras and he loaned me a little 35mm slr with a macro lens whenever he came to visit. That's how it started! He supplied me with my first camera and even an enlarger, and I developed and printed black and white pictures in a small room in our house.
When I moved to Uni, it didn't take me long to convince the manager of the residential hall where I lived, that photography was a good thing for everybody, and that we should have a darkroom. So I converted a small room with a sink on the second floor of the building. It didn't last all that long! A certain person (unknown identity of course) forgot to turn the taps off one night and flooded the entire floor of the building plus a bit more downstairs.
Not long after that, I married and we moved to Alice Springs in central Australia (1979). No shortage of natural history subjects to photograph there, and the days of black and white were also over. I was into colour slides by that stage. Good ol' Kodachrome! We lived there for many years and I worked with what was the Conservation Commission of the NT (Now Natural Resources, Environment, The Arts and Sport).
In 1993 we moved to Queensland and I worked with the Queensland Parks and Wildlife Service.
A few years of colour slides, and then it all happened!!! The rise of digital cameras and the internet! I was probably a bit slow to adopt the digital revolution, and so only really started taking digi pics about six years ago. All of the images that I have uploaded here are from the last 5 years or so. I will be scanning and adding some of my best slides at some stage - when I have time.
Hopefully you will find the site relatively simple to navigate and if you are lucky, you might find a few images that you like. I was at a conference recently and a fellow conferencer said, after showing some of his favorite images, "it's not the number of times we breathe that matters, but the number of times our breath is taken away". Now I have no idea if it was an original quote or not, but it did strike a chord with me. I don't think my images are that good, but it's a great goal to aim for. I hope you enjoy looking around.
Bruce Thomson
