About Me

This was one of the hardest pages to write.  Talk about me.  Well, I'm a mess.  I am a 28-year-old qualified electronic engineer with two forklift licenses (Irish and Australian), who is currently a part-time champion English teacher, part-time photographer and part-time football superstar in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. 

The story of how I came to be here starts at the tender age of 25, when I left home on a one year adventure to South East Asia and Australia.  Three and a half years later, I still haven’t found my way back.

The moment I crossed the Thai border into Cambodia for the first time, I knew there was something special about this country.  For eight hours, I was thrown violently around a rickety, old bus, as it travelled on the most pot-holed stretch of road I have ever seen.  Coming from Ireland, I know a thing or two about bad roads, but even I was impressed with the very high Asian pot-hole standard.  The bus driver averaged 500 horn beeps per hour as he snaked the 1960’s made chariot of rust between craters in an attempt to find the least bumpy route.  Now and again, he would turn around to make sure that none of his passengers had been killed.  When only reports of superficial bruising and minor bleeding were transmitted back to him, he smiled toothlessly, nodded his head in approval, tooted his horn two or three times in celebration, and finally turned his head again to concentrate on avoiding the craters that littered the road ahead.

So this is Cambodia eh?  I like it!

One extension visa led to another and then another.  Every time I left to continue my travelling, I always missed the place and inevitably found myself back here again and again.

Eventually, I decided to settle here for a while and do a few hours English teaching to pay the bills.  Two years later, I was still teaching a backbreaking 3.5 hours a day.  I kept promising myself that I would get off my arse and sort my life out as soon as I received the divine inspiration I had been waiting for.  What to do with my life?  Career, house, car, wife ....?  I figured when I eventually knew what career I wanted to do, I would immerse myself in it and in all likelihood spend thirty odd years slaving away.  So what’s the point in working too hard now when I would only be doing something that I didn’t really want to do?  Waiting for divine inspiration seemed like a much better option.

Well, somewhere in the middle of this lounging about waiting for a signal from the Big Man upstairs, I travelled around this beautiful country.  Every time I had a holiday, I would drive my 100cc second hand Korean import ‘Daelim’ motorbike into the countryside for an adventure.  Luckily for me, I had plenty of time to explore, as Cambodia has, a quite impressive, 25 days of public holidays a year.  It was then that I started taking an odd photograph or two with a 3.2 MP Olympus. 

I had never been interested in photography before.  In truth, I often found myself cringing as I witnessed other tourists taking shots of bemused locals or mundane attractions.  I was always afraid that when I took shots, I too stuck out like a sore thumb.  I didn’t want to be the annoying foreigner looking in at other people’s lives from the outside disturbing them with my camera.  I wanted to get to know them and their lifestyle and capture it, not from the outside, but from within.

The longer I stayed, the more of the language I learned and the easier it was to be accepted into people’s lives.  With every word I learned, I became less embarrassed to introduce my camera into situations and circumstances that were unfolding before my very eyes. 

This form of unstaged and unrehearsed photography really intrigued me.  In theory, the task is simple.  Capture everyday people doing everyday things.  In practice, it isn’t that easy.  When you point a camera at someone, they naturally become self-aware.  Some instinctively run and hide, while others revel in the attention and put on fake and unnatural expressions.  Either way, the results are disastrous.

A large percentage of the time the shots I took were far from spectacular.  Sometimes, just sometimes however, I managed to capture something so normal and natural that it absolutely captivated me.  With each success, I took encouragement and forgot the hundreds of failures that had gone before.

As time went by, I upgraded cameras from my 3.2 MP Olympus point and shoot, to an 8MP fully manual Canon, to a 12MP Nikon DSLR.  Without even realising, I had fallen in love with photography.  Everyday while I taught hyper-active, mischievous students in school, my mind wondered about possible locations, adventures and shots.  I was hooked.

And this is where I am today.  I am tired of waiting for divine career inspiration.  Maybe I have already received it.  It was just sent from above in a more subtle manner than I had expected.  No parting of the clouds, no thunderous proclamations from the heavens, no visions or prophecies, and thankfully no near-death life-changing experiences.  Instead, photography quietly sneaked up on me from behind and mugged me.

So, now it’s time to make good on that promise I made to myself.  It’s time to get off my arse and sort my life out.  Using the 1000’s of stored images on my computer I have decided to design this website and see if I can make a profession out of my hobby.

At the time of writing, I am currently on my 12th Cambodian extension visa.  How many more I will go through before I feel like moving on is unknown to me.  Until then, I will keep shooting.

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