A bit of background about me

My name is Ronnie West and, although I now live in South Wales (UK), I was actually born in the East End of London in the early part of the second world war.

From the age of 10 to 15 I attended a boarding school in Lancashire and it was here that I had my very first insight into photography. My first camera was a Kodak Brownie, one of the good old box type camera's that yielded surprisingly good results. I soon upgraded to a super folding type camera called the 'Penquin' made by the Kershaw Photographic Company. This camera used 120 roll film and produced images that were only just a little better than the Brownie. I spent much of my spare time in the school darkroom and, in those days, colour film was in its infancy so all my work was done on black and white FP4 film. I remember that I used to squeegee my finished prints onto a sheet of plate glass in order to get a high gloss finish. My equipment today still includes a roll film camera, the Canon 1v, although I have to confess that I do not use it very much since converting to the digital age. I have had a few digital cameras , Olympus E20, Nikon 990, Canon 10D, Canon 1D Mark II, Nikon D2xs, to mention just a few. In 2007 I upgraded my current camera to the Canon 1Ds Mark II and am very pleased with the results that I am now getting. I first used this camera at the Marwell Animal Park, so take a look at the the images in the Marwell gallery and judge the quality for yourself. I feel sure you will agree that the quality is excellent.

I became interested in image editing a long while ago and used to work with editing software called Paint shop Pro, which I thought was the bees knees, then a friend introduced me to Adobe Photoshop and I have been hooked ever since. I currently use a program called Pictures To Exe to make my slide shows and, when I first started, I discovered that there were so many techniques to learn that I often worked well into the night in order to master them. In recent times, the Pictures To Exe software has moved forward in leaps and bounds and the current version (5.5 deluxe) is probably the best on the market for producing brilliant slide shows. It allows you to create some excellent animations such as pan, zoom and rotate (often referred to as the 'Ken Burns Effect') but a word of caution to those of you who are just beginning, animation used in a slide show because the learning curve can be quite steep so, walk before you run, and start out with version 4.49.

It was because I found audio visual so stimulating that I decided to pass on some of the things I had learned along the way to those of you who might be grateful for some helpful guidance. To this end, I now produce written pdf tutorials that show just how easy it can be to manipulate your images to produce your very own slide shows that you will be very proud to show to all your friends. You will find details of all these tutorials on the Sales page.