Self portrait with D60 - Warren Mars

Welcome To My Photography Pages.

I kind of drifted into Photography and had no idea that it was going to take over so much of my life and cause me so much joy and pain. I have been deeply immersed in it for the past 8 years and have taken in excess of 35,000 shots in that time. I have owned 10 cameras, 2 tripods and 6 lenses and have experimented widely with whatever subjects, techniques and equipment I could get my hands on. I have read widely and thought deeply about the subject and contributed to various online forums and been amazed at the horrible people who live in those places. I have bought equipment that simply doesn't work and I have suffered at the hands of manufacturers who lie and cheat and don't care and offer support that is a complete joke. I have learned bitter lessons about the power of an image from people who don't want their photo taken. I have had my work misjudged in photo competitions and I have been banned from forums for speaking the truth. Finally however, I have won through, and have taken many fine shots. I have equipment I can trust and friends who share my passion. I am a photographer.

I offer some camera and lens reviews in these pages, but only those that I have bought personally. This is not primarily a review site, God knows there plenty of them already, it's an enthusiast's site, filled with anything I think other enthusiasts might find interesting.

I am an instrumental and computer scientist, and I am one of the few photographers who really understand the nitty gritty of how these cameras work. I'm the guy who prepared his own DoF tables in Excel before he bought an SLR. I'm the guy who figured out Poisson partitioning for himself and graphed the result. I'm the guy who created his own Blur test from Joyce's Ulysses and benchmarked 3 Tamron lenses to find the only one worth having. I'm the guy who compared the various JPG compression levels to pick the best compromise between space and quality. I'm the guy who sets the location and photographer fields in every image I save. Finally I'm the guy that deals with image processing everyday for his various web sites. Sure there are other camera geeks out there, but I'm fairly extreme. In the technical section I offer some hopefully definitive and occasionally ground-breaking analysis of the technical side of photography that will hopefully open the eyes of the serious photographer.

It seems everyone has a Flickr page these days, and they leave me cold. They are clumsy to navigate through, usually you can't see the full image, the EXIF is a pain to activate and then there are the reams of sycophantic comments. Spare me! I offer my galleries in the way I want to see them: decent thumbnails, grouped by category, full resolution if wanted, the useful EXIF and some comments from me about the shot.

Because I live in Portland, Victoria, Australia, most of these images are from this area. We Portlanders are fortunate to live in such an historic town and to be surrounded with such wonderful scenery, including Victoria's most beautiful and wild coastline, the coastal heathlands, the Glenelg River and the remnants of the great Cobboboonee forest. If you can't find a photographic subject here you need shooting!

If you wish to comment on these pages, feel free. You can join my forums or email me.