Photography for me only recently became a hobby a few years ago. When I was just seventeen I bought my first camera with the intention of creating some serious images. SLR's back then were well out of my reach, so I purchased a Sony Cybershot. At the time it was best thing I'd ever seen. I shot mostly landscapes and architecture at a fairly amateur level. I made it my mission to memorise the whole manual to work out how to get the best control over the settings - but I wanted more.

I started to take a few shots at different weddings (as a guest). I love the traditional first dance. This became one of the 'must get' shots I took. Then I started getting Photoshop to see where I could add new effects to add another dimension to my images. Don't get me wrong, I'm not talking about heavy image manipulation, just a few things like black and white conversions, colour adjustments and brightening images. Again, at a very amateur level.

Then in 2007, with the passing of my Nan into a better place, I had an amount of money to make something more of. Most of it went on a new Guitar to help lead worship to God (Nan would have wanted that) and the rest bought me my first DSLR. It was a Canon 350D and I couldn't put it down. Suddenly my photography started to take off because of the new control I had over my images. A new passion was born.

There's a whole world out there to capture and I make sure that I do at every opportunity. I started to follow several American podcasts on Photoshop and photo skills. Over the space of about a year, I learnt a lot more about retouching, composition and technique mostly thanks to the Kelby media group.

In early 2008, I upgraded to a Canon 40D and a suite of lenses. This was all around the same time that our baby girl entered the world. As you can imagine, I now had two babies to play with. Needless to say they both get on fine and are good friends with each other. The biggest change in my photography here was that I found myself taking more and more people pictures. These pictures demanded high expectations of quality and excellence by those that I was taking pictures of - so I had to up my game.

The year passed by in a flash (no pun intended) and I began to appear at more weddings (as "guest with big camera") and took more coverage of them. Most of the official photographers were very friendly and were able to give me some good tips. I also began covering events such as parties, baptisms and conferences. My pictures appeared in the Baptist Times, BBC news website, Recruitment International and I was featured twice in a row in Digital Photo magazine.

In September 2009 I decided to go professional and upgraded my camera further to a Canon 5D mark II. The quality and difference this camera makes is leagues above anything else I've seen. This is when I started to advertise my services out and began building up my website and portfolio.

In December I produced my first portfolio calendar and In March 2010 I shot my first wedding as 'official photographer' after already booking in another for August 2010. The lead up to this had me cramming in more training from Kelby Media and in particular considered with the release a book from a great American wedding photographer called David Ziser. Without these guys I would not have been quite prepared. I'll let you read the testimonials for yourself as to what my first clients thought of their pictures.

Now with confidence, experience and a whole suite of gadgets, I offer my services to anyone that's interested.