About

It all started end of summer 2006. I was about to take a 6 month leave of absence from work and travel in South America. Travel has always been a big passion of mine and I have travelled all over the world before this trip. I don’t know from where I got the idea but for some reason I started thinking about buying a better camera for this trip. Replacing the 4 year old compact camera.

I had of course saved a lot of money for this trip and I though I had saved enough to also afford a pretty good camera. So off I went to the store to buy a Nikon D70s, the entry level camera from Nikon at the time, just a week before leaving for South America. I bought it with the 18-70 mm kit lens. I had no intentions at this time to do any serious photography or become the new Ansel Adams or anything. I just wanted a better camera.

I played with it a few days at home. Used only automatic mode. Making sure I knew how to at least take a picture with it. I had never used a SLR camera before in my whole life. Then when I arrived in South America it all exploded. So many things to photograph, and I quickly realized that I loved doing it! Still only in automatic mode but I was thinking more and more about my compositions. I joined online photography forums and got advice and discussed photography. I uploaded my pictures and got reviews.I also learned a lot from other people I met during my travels that also were into photography, both professionals and “amateurs”. Soon I left automatic mode and never came back.

Spending 6 month in South America with such a big focus on photography as it ended up with and getting help from other photographers I meet and the online photography communities was probably the best photography beginners education I could get.

When I got home 6 month later I had bought myself two more lenses. One 55-200 mm lens in Buenos Aires and one 105 mm macro lens in Chile. I had thousand of images and I even managed to sell some of them. My new big passion in life besides traveling was now photography.

That was a couple of years ago. I have travelled to some other places since then. Like India, Scotland, South East Asia and some other places. My gear has ben replaced with better gear a couple of times and my trips are now 100% focused on taking great pictures. It’s almost as if I can miss the days when I travelled just for fun and relaxation I still have a day job. I work as a software engineer at Sony Ericsson making mobile phones but planning on one day taking the step to pay the bills with my camera instead.