About Me

My name is Gerry, and the hardest thing for me to do is to answer people when they ask "What do you do?" The stock answer to that is "Whatever I want to".

However, it’s not quite as simple as that, but one thing is certain: I have always had a passion for two things: people and images". I love people - the differences, the similarities, the character(s), the uniqueness, the beauty there is to be found. Something else I always loved was drawing.

I was at my happiest as a child when I was bundled up in my room, creating images with pencils, pens and poster paints. I was good. Not brilliant, but better than average. When I was released for good behaviour from 12 years of state-sanctioned imprisonment (also known as public schooling), I went to a tin-pot vocational college where I supposedly "studied art. I failed my first year - twice - because, even though I was one of the top three students in my five (practical) subjects, I failed the sixth one, the theoretical history of art, and the college decided I couldn’t progress. I wasn’t academic enough to become a trained artist (hence the "tin-pot" statement above). So ended my attempt at a formal education.

However, college did give me one good thing. I’ll never forget the magic I felt the first time I walked into a darkroom, and the sheer creative energy I felt in the photography class. I fell in love with an old Ricoh XR7 that was busted in such an odd way it only worked when you held it upside down. I fell in love with the image, all over again.

Then life happened: The standard 9-5 jobs, starting out in warehousing and ending up with my own company doing web development. An unfortunate side-effect of life happening was that my camera, by now a Pentax MZ-50 (that worked right-side up), started to gather a lot of dust, and the pencils and paints I loved so much were forgotten in a hollow corner of a closet in my bedroom. The fortunate side-effect was that, in my career as a web developer, I was exposed to a lot of great imagery, and I honed the art (and craft) of making the web work to such an extent that I became a self-confessed pixel-level perfectionist. I now KNOW what a good image is - something I did not know when I was in college.

In April 2008, I decided it was time for me to cross the digital divide and ordered the new Nikon D300. That camera cost almost as much as my car, and by the time I’ve bought the casing for underwater photography, it WILL cost more than my car.

The net result is that, after a year of shooting digital, shooting as many people and things as possible, I’ve moved on to professional photography, shooting all sorts of people, from pregnant wives to models, from body-builders to families, with the occasional wedding and corporate event thrown in for good measure. And I’m enjoying the heck out of it.

And that’s me in a nutshell. Self-indulgent? Maybe, but it’s honest. I hope you enjoy this site as much as I did getting there.

Gerry