Me

I am an amateur photographer based in Cambridgeshire, my main passion is for wildlife, but domestic animals, landscapes and the natural world in general also feature regularly in my photography. Unfortunately the reality of a day job, and a busy life outside work mean I don’t get to spend as much time as I’d like doing photography, but I always try to make as many opportunities as I can.

In addition to photography and animals, another interest of mine is the martial ats. I previously trained in Kickboxing for 4 years from the age of 15 and then for 3 years in Aikido, achieving brown belt in both. I then however spent about a year out of action from Aikido with a persistent shoulder injury and afterwards never really got back into it for various reasons. I did however always retain a keen interest in the martial arts in general and eventually went back to my roots so to speak and took up Kickboxing again, with the aim of finally achieving a long standing ambition to earn my black belt and become qualified as an instructor. Another, more recently discovered, hobby is snowboarding, something that for a long time I thought looked great fun but until a couple of years ago just never got round to trying, however after doing a learn in a day session at Sno!zone in Milton Keynes, I became hooked and now know what the call of the mountains feels like!

My Photography

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. The rest, as they say, is history, my array of gear has exponentially grown over the years (although the coveted Nikon 200-400 lens still remains out of my financial grasp for the forseeable future) and I have attended many photography workshops at wildlife parks around the country to further my ability and compensate for the lack of time and funds to see so many of earth’s more exotic creatures in their natural habitat

None of my work is heavily ‘photoshopped’, I personally feel that too much post processing diverges from the realms of photography into digital art, which I have absolutely nothing against, but it’s just not what my photography is about, I like to capture a moment or scene as best I can, not manipulate it later. The only noteworthy exception to that rule is that I do occasionally use exposure bracketing and subsequent exposure blending for sunsets or landscape shots with too great a contrast to capture accurately in one shot. Otherwise aside from some minor things (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 generally ‘as shot’, I rarely do anything more than cropping and RAW conversions to balance exposure and bring out colours where needed. Adobe Lightroom with a couple of handy plugins is my primary workflow tool for everything from importing photos to publishing them to the web, and I can’t remember the last time I needed anything else

Website

As a non professional photographer, I didn’t build this website to try and sell my work (although if anybody out there fancies paying me an exhorbitant fee for use of any of my work then I’m all ears ), I built it because people kept telling I should display my work somehow and I decided that, since I didn’t see any point in printing for the sake of printing and wasn’t sold on the idea of camera clubs (I’m focussed on the natural world and simply have no interest in a lot of other common themes), being an IT geek and all, a website would be the most logical outlet. Not that I had the faintest clue about website design when I first started, but via various great utilities and several major re-designs, the site has continued to serve it’s purpose and is ever improving as I come up with new ideas or happen upon new additions I can implement

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 concluding 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.

Well essay over, 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.