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Who is Mark Wilson?
Posted by Mark Wilson,
16 January 2012
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417 views
mjmw mark wilson mark j m wilson
Originally born and raised in Kent, I now live with my wife Vanessa and our slightly neurotic chickens in North Norfolk. We spent 10 years moving around the UK and over to the USA in response to our careers before deciding that it was time to settle somewhere we wanted to live. So we bought a place in Norfolk in 2010.
My working life has predominantly been around data management systems, from programmer through to project and programme management, so my inner geek gets a good workout both at work and with my cameras and associated technology. I also have a small photography business, which has taken a bit of a back seat with the move - modernising the house and gardening have been filling my hours outside of work.
I have been interested in birds and wildlife since I was very young. I am very lucky and grateful that my parents shared and encouraged this love of the outdoors, helping me grow that early interest into something more. My father is a keen birder and naturally this meant that I was identifying birds in the garden before I could walk.
I also have that strange affliction that many birders seem to get - blurting out the name of every bird I see - kind of like the ornithological equivalent of tourette syndrome. I try to do this silently in my head but sometimes the words just pop out of my mouth, much to the amusement and sometimes bemusement of any non-birders nearby. Imagine a business meeting, imagine me seeing an interesting bird, imagine the reaction...
My father is also responsible for my photography habit, teaching me the basics with a manual SLR when I was quite young. I think the first bird I photographed was a Little Blue Heron in Florida, from a boat, with an Olympus OM10 and a 70-200mm type zoom lens, about 25 years ago. No, it wasn't a very good photograph and no, I don't still have a copy.
Canon EOS cameras first arrived in my life in the early 1990s, Sony camcorders in the late 1990s and my first digital camera in 2000. At the time I only wanted to provide reference material for my sketches and paintings, at least that was my excuse for the quality of the majority of my photographs then!
I tried out digiscoping (sticking a digital point and shoot on your telescope) but never really got on well with that so I decided in 2005 that I needed a real SLR camera again and some big white lenses. I also decided that I was going to concentrate on creating photographs rather than sketches.
The biggest help for me when improving my photography came from forums. I learnt a lot through receiving critique on my images but more so from giving feedback - it made me really think about why I liked a photo, what I would change and how I would do it differently.
I also learnt that everyone has different taste and the people who got the most from critique were those that locked away their ego.
Finally, to answer a couple of common questions:
My working life has predominantly been around data management systems, from programmer through to project and programme management, so my inner geek gets a good workout both at work and with my cameras and associated technology. I also have a small photography business, which has taken a bit of a back seat with the move - modernising the house and gardening have been filling my hours outside of work.
I have been interested in birds and wildlife since I was very young. I am very lucky and grateful that my parents shared and encouraged this love of the outdoors, helping me grow that early interest into something more. My father is a keen birder and naturally this meant that I was identifying birds in the garden before I could walk.
I also have that strange affliction that many birders seem to get - blurting out the name of every bird I see - kind of like the ornithological equivalent of tourette syndrome. I try to do this silently in my head but sometimes the words just pop out of my mouth, much to the amusement and sometimes bemusement of any non-birders nearby. Imagine a business meeting, imagine me seeing an interesting bird, imagine the reaction...
My father is also responsible for my photography habit, teaching me the basics with a manual SLR when I was quite young. I think the first bird I photographed was a Little Blue Heron in Florida, from a boat, with an Olympus OM10 and a 70-200mm type zoom lens, about 25 years ago. No, it wasn't a very good photograph and no, I don't still have a copy.
Canon EOS cameras first arrived in my life in the early 1990s, Sony camcorders in the late 1990s and my first digital camera in 2000. At the time I only wanted to provide reference material for my sketches and paintings, at least that was my excuse for the quality of the majority of my photographs then!
I tried out digiscoping (sticking a digital point and shoot on your telescope) but never really got on well with that so I decided in 2005 that I needed a real SLR camera again and some big white lenses. I also decided that I was going to concentrate on creating photographs rather than sketches.
The biggest help for me when improving my photography came from forums. I learnt a lot through receiving critique on my images but more so from giving feedback - it made me really think about why I liked a photo, what I would change and how I would do it differently.
I also learnt that everyone has different taste and the people who got the most from critique were those that locked away their ego.
Finally, to answer a couple of common questions:
- I use my middle initials in my signature, watermarks, etc because there are several photographers out there called Mark Wilson, the cause of much confusion and once led to a breach of my copyright.
- My domain name (rusticolus.co.uk) is from my favourite bird Falco rusticolus, Gyr falcon.
That White-tailed Eagle is none too shabby!
