On the left you will find links to some of my recent photo shoots.

My photography...

Most of my early photography was at gigs, where I slowly became familiar with technical terms like white balance, aperture and film speed. I later discovered that gigs are one of the hardest things to shoot because the lighting is usually terrible. You could say I learnt the basics the hard way.

I joined the Melbourne Camera Club in 2003 when I started attending their monthly portrait nights. I did my first solo portrait shoot in the studio in 2004, learnt the basics fairly quickly and became the co-ordinator of the MCC Portrait Group in 2005. I gave up that role at the end of 2007 so that I could focus purely on my own shooting. I am still involved in the club, presenting a couple of sessions in their regular photography course (on the topics of lighting and digital photography) and helping other members improve their photography.

While I mostly shoot portraits these days, I still occasionally shoot gigs: they remain challenging for a number of reasons but it's very satisfying to get a great photo out of such a difficult environment.

My portrait subjects are usually friends, friends of friends and friends of friends of friends. My interest in music has also led to me shooting bands, capturing them while they're rehearsing or recording and occasionally, setting up posed publicity shots for them.

Having grown up loving music, most of the portrait photography I've been exposed to has been through the pages of Rolling Stone magazine. This means I'm more familiar with the work of Annie Leibovitz, Herb Ritts, Matthew Rolston and Mark Seliger than 'traditional' photographers.

As someone who is comfortable working with a computer (I work in IT) I once spent a lot of time post-processing my images to crop them or fix colours or just to be creative. Now I aim to get it correct in camera: taking an extra few seconds to compose a photo correctly will always be quicker than cropping it later in the computer.

At present I don't shoot weddings in any formal sense. If I'm invited to a wedding as a guest, I may bring my camera and take some shots but I shy away from the responsibility of being the official photographer for someone's special day.

Wannabe photographer?

Actually, that's a lie. I have no ambition to become a professional photographer. I needed something on my 'business' card that explained I took photos but "David Gilliver, photographer" seemed too pompous. I thought the 'wannabe' tag sounded more amusing.

Photography is my hobby. That means I get to choose what I take photos of. I've had a number of opportunities to take photos that would have been great for a professional portfolio but I've usually turned them down. If a shoot sounds like more stress than fun, it doesn't sound much like a hobby anymore.

That's not to say I don't aspire to produce professional results. I would like to produce images as slick as any pro can. Over the past few years I feel like I'm taking better and better photos and I hope to continue improving in the future. I'd be crazy to aim to produce mediocre photos wouldn't I?

I have done paid shoots. Sometimes I've been asked to shoot something that's sounded like fun and the money has been a bonus. Other times I've taken photos for free and my subject has decided they liked the results so much they want to contribute to my camera-gear-purchasing-fund. Don't laugh, that really does happen.

My gear...

I've been shooting with digital cameras since 1998, starting with a very basic Olympus D-220L. From there it was an Olympus 2000Z (1999), Olympus 4040Z (2001) and Olympus 5050Z (2003).

In 2004 I made the step up to shooting with a Canon EOS digital SLR. I have a few different lenses, my favourite being the ultra cheap f1.8 50mm.

These days I shoot RAW + JPG files, and I give my models all of the JPG files (unless they need the RAW files). I don't use Photoshop at all and do most of my image processing under Linux using The Gimp, ufraw/dcraw (for RAW file processing), the ImageMagick image processing tools and a bunch of UNIX shell scripts I've written.

Photography sites...

There are a number of photography-related websites I read regularly.

I am an avid champion of the Strobist lighting site. If you think you've mastered the basics of how to use your camera, this site has everything you need to climb to the next level (and probably well beyond). The creator of the site (David Hobby) should get some kind of award for services to photographic education.

For interesting discussion of all sorts of photography issues, I like to read The Online Photographer.

For news and reviews of cameras, I primarily read dpreview with occasional glances at Steve's Digicams and Digital Camera Resource sites.