I started taking my photography seriously while at high school and playing with my mothers Olympus OM1 with a Tamron zoom. In hind-sight it wasn’t a great camera but at the time it was all I knew and it was a work horse which my mother got 20 good years out of with relatively few dramas.

My main use of the camera was photographing the school sports which I did along with a friend. It was great because we churned through school film and had our work published each year in the school magazine.

After finishing school, doing my music undergrad course then becoming a teacher, I lashed out and bought my first SLR, the Nikon F70, and went back into sports photography and publishing in school magazines.

These days, I have done the school sports so many times, I just know where to go and stand to get the same old shots year after year. In a way I feel I have the game figured out and thus I find myself now straying from photo-journalism and into the portrait world. But after a 24 month break, I returned to my roots of sports shooting today. I also aired my Sigma 600mm Mirror lense for the first time with my D700. Hadn’t used that lense since my film days.
These shots were the results of a day of shooting with that lense and another crappy Nikon lense, the 80-300mm that they package with standard kits but I was also surprised at the results with this lense. Maybe I underestimated the “crappiness” scale of cheap Nikon lenses!