About
I first got into photography in Autumn of 2006 after a friend and I spontaneously booked a holiday in Africa and I decided to pick up a digital camera with a long zoom to enable me to get shots of the wildlife out there. At the time I never really expected to take it too seriously, just buying a decent all in one camera that would serve it’s purpose for the trip, but no sooner did I start to get to grips with the thing than my interest in photography snowballed and 6 months later I was buying my first DSLR. Since then my interest in and knowledge of photography has continued to grow and the more I learn the more I enjoy it.
For anybody who may be wondering about the choice of name for my site, I have no affiliation whatsoever with the famous surfing brand or anything else under the same name, Billabong is simply a nickname I acquired in secondary school which has followed me around ever since and when choosing the name for my site, after deciding that obvious options such as jamesbylettphotography.co.uk just didn’t sound particularly catchy, I decided that billabong-photos.co.uk did have a certain ring to it and that sealed the deal.
As the site title suggests, the majority of what you’ll see here is wildlife and pet photos, as I love animals and they are my primary photographic interest, although you’ll also find all manner of other shots such as a few sunsets, landscapes and assorted snapshots from my holiday in Africa.
None of my work is heavily ‘photoshopped’, I feel that too much post processing diverges from the realms of photography into digital art, which I have nothing against, but it’s just not what my photography is about and quite frankly I don’t have sufficient know how or patience for it, so with one or 2 minor exceptions (e.g. cloing out a red dot from a photo where I was using a laser pen to catch the attention of a playful moggy), my photos are for the most part ‘as shot’ and I rarely go any further than RAW conversions, colour adjustments and cropping.
In addition to photography and animals, another interest of mine is the martial ats, which I have trained in previously, training in Kickboxing for 4 years from the age of 15 and then more recently for 3 years in Aikido, achieving brown belt in both. I spent about a year out of action from Aikido however with a persistent shoulder injury and since then never really got back into it as during that period other pursuits began to take up more of my time and these days I find my time is simply taken up elsewhere, however I still regularly recall elements of my old training (I reckon it’s one of those ‘it’s like riding a bike, you never really forget’ sort of things) and still take an interest in the martial arts even though I no longer train myself. There has been some crossover between my Aikido and photography in the past however, as when I was not training due to injury it was not unknown for me to make myself useful taking class photos, a few of which can be seen on the dojo’s website (see the links page) and more of which can be seen in my galleries.
Well that’s me and the site in a nutshell, if you’d like to know any more please feel free to drop me a line via the contacts page.