Grete Howard's photostream  

This is where I try to describe myself in a few words. Help! I am so complex (read: confused!) that a few pages wouldn’t even begin to tell you about me. I am 50 years old, was born in Norway, but married an Englishman and have settled in England for the last 30 years.

I have always been interested in photography; from as far back as I can remember. I cut my teeth on a box brownie, in the days without TTL focussing or metering. This taught me a lot, and I love fiddling with the setting on my camera. I did a course on photography when I was 15, and later joined a camera club where I would enter competitions and join in with the projects for a number of years.

A decade ago I had a neck injury which meant I was no longer able to carry my camera equipment around with me. It broke my heart the day I had to sell my Canon EOS 5 and EOS 100 bodies, 20-35mm, 28-70mm 90mm macro, 70-210mm and 500mm lenses, the 430EZ flashgun, set of Cokin filters and Billingham bag. In exchange I bought a semi-decent zoom compact, but photography lost its shine for me that day.

Digital photography has therefore really renewed my interest in photography. I can carry my bridge camera without too much trouble, I can adjust all the settings in the same way I could with my SLR, and I get half-decent results. Even better than that, I can take as many photos as I like without it costing me a penny more. I have always been very trigger happy, and managed to use up 61 rolls of slide film on a three-week trip once, at the cost of another trip! These days – after the initial outlay – it costs me nothing!

I use various editing programs to fine-tune my photos when I get back from my trips: Camedia for cropping and storing my photos, as well as for printing, Picasa for straightening the horizon (I seem to have a leaning to the right), Photoshop Elements and Photoshop CS2 to adjust the contrast, levels, colours etc. (I started with Elements prior to acquiring the full Photoshop, and there are certain aspects that I still prefer to use Elements for) and Photoscape for framing my pictures (I know many people don’t like frames, but I feel they are naked or unfinished without at least a simple black like around them.) I have also recently bought Photomatix to play about with some HDR and tone mapping.

I am passionate – no, change that to obsessive – about travel. All my money and time goes on something travel related, be it research, booking, the actual travel itself, reading about it on the net or in books, taking photographs, editing my photos on my return or just talking about it. I live, eat and breathe travel. I don’t have any preferred travel method or destination, although I do like to follow the paths less trodden. I have been lucky to visit well in excess of 100 countries, but unfortunately 80 of them were prior to the digital age, so I am painstakingly trying to scan in thousands of slides and prints. And I mean thousands!

I have no real preference regarding my photographic subject, I am quite happy to snap away at landscapes, animals, plants and flowers, macro and architecture, but my favourite is probably people, especially children.

That’s Grete in a nutshell, if you want to know more, feel free to drop me a line.