About Me

This site has become my backpack on the web and if you have made it this far, you’re doing well- most people would have gone to look at porn by now. If you want to leave me a message, that’ll be great. You can do so on my Contact Me page.

A little about me

The first thing you should know about me is that I’m one of the luckiest guys ever. For a starters, I have a great job. I get to travel around the world writing for Lonely Planet and taking photos at the same time. I was travelling for quite a few years before I started writing for Lonely Planet but now I get paid for it. Sweet. You can read more about how I became a Lonely Planet author on this page.

How I got started travelling
My first trip was to Japan with a friend where we became English teachers and from there I never really looked back. So 15 years, 80 countries, five continents and three backpacks later, I’m still going strong. I’m a survivor of three bus crashes, a shipwreck, malaria and marriage. I’m a bit like a weed – not so pretty but hard to kill.

After that I settled down for a bit and wrote  Roam: the art of travel which was published by HarperCollins in New Zealand. Writing Roam was heaps of fun. I could say what I liked and got to use lots of my photography. Up until that point I had only used photography to help sell my stories to budget-watching editors but with Roam they were just as important as the text. You can read about Roam: the Art of Travel on this page.

It was while writing Roam that I realised how crappy many of my photos are and how many great photographic opportunities I had missed over the years. I brought a new camera and really started to pay attention to what I was doing. I already had a good collection of portraits from around the world but only recently have my landscapes shots improved. You can see some of my work on the PhotoBlog page.

So whose the girl?

Well you have probably figured out which one is me, the other person is Debbie, my wife, and if you have watched any of my video tutorials about photography you probably recognize her from those. I’m always roping her into my projects and she is often made (I get shitty if she doesn’t) to stand in front of my camera and deliver the lesson. This is because I have a terrible fear of public speaking and don’t sound half as eloquent as she does. She is pretty good at photography herself and to be honest, some of the pictures on here are hers. I’m not telling you which ones as I find it much easier just to take all the credit.