My background

I started with an old Canon 450d, 12.2mp DSLR camera back around 2013(ish) as part of a new hobby and quickly became hooked on going out on days off and seeing what kind of a mess i could get myself into trying to grab a longer distance photo than i could with my phone!

After a little while of lugging this beast around i saw on an advert online that there was this dinky little mirrorless camera the size of an instant point and click camera (almost…) that had interchangeable lenses by Sony.. I duly obliged and picked up a used Nex 5 with the kit 18-55 and 55-210 lenses that had optical steady built into them. Now this was a game changer for me.. as now I had a lighter, smaller camera that i could carry (almost) in a pocket that could take as good a photo as the big dinosaur 450d could! I preferred the colours of the photos that the Sony took personally and found it easier to use, and over the next couple of years I upgraded to its big brother the Nex7 which took me from 12.2mp of the 450d, to 24.3mp with the Nex7.

Now fast forward a few years to 2021 and I took my first leap into a more technical camera and stayed with the slim mirrorless design that I had become used too and purchased a Sony A6400 which was my main bread and butter camera for the next 3 years taking wildlife photos using the Tamron 70-300mm lens for longer distances until I was able to get my hands on Sony’s formidable 200-600mm G OSS f5.6-6.3 lens. The world was now my playground and I had found a new sense of happiness of taking (to me) some really crazy up close photos of wildlife that just a few years ago I was only able to dream of.

I joined a few nature reserves and got some helpful tips and advice from some of the regulars there, who decided it was worth their time to sit down with this over keen whippersnapper of a guy (me lol), and as I took the time to appreciate their teachings and put it into practice I quickly found that I had been doing stuff very very wrong from the word go and had been lucky with most of my good photos considering the settings being used on the camera!

2023 saw my first foray into the professional camera range with first the Sony a7Rii with its monstrous 42mp full frame sensor, which really shocked me as for some reason I went from almost 50% throwaway photos (blurry) .. down to about 30% instantly. I realised I naturally found the full frame format easier to use then the crop sensor (aps-c) to date that I was used to. The problem….. only 5 frames per second in high speed mode! (the a6400 for instance could do 11fps.. double but could not match the image size/quality potential of the big brother)

My Solution … End of 2024 I scored a bargain used buy of a Sony a9ii mirrorless camera.. Still full frame, ultra modern and packing a ton of features that made all my other cameras to date look like an abacus, and a high speed rate of 20fps in high speed continuous photo mode! The drawback, and there always is…, was the picture size decreased from 42mp down to 24mp. This did not bother me too much and to this date, I still use my a9ii and love it!