Woklife :: About :: Richard Jones

About

Who are you?

My name's Richard Jones, I'm a programmer by trade and have lived most of my life in the UK.

What's this Woklife site?

It's my personal photoblog. The main aim is to use it to improve my photography by trying to post a shot a day shot a week*. This site is also the first online prototype for the pixyBlog photoblogging service. Over the weeks, months and years the site will be expanded with new features as they are developed and released.

*All credit to the shot-a-day photoblogs out there. I tried and failed... it's a lot harder than I thought.

Why 'woklife.com'?

When I started developing pixyBlog I was living in Thailand and wanted a photoblog to document day-to-day living; I choose the domain woklife.com. I later moved back to the UK to get the company off the ground, but still run this site under woklife.com. Maybe I'll change it, maybe I won't.

What's your interest in Photography?

It probably started with my dad and his Olympus OM10. I loved the mix of technology and art; if I'm honest it's more of the technology then the art. My dad's been into photography for as long as I can remember and the house is full of photo albums for each and every year; all indexed and commented.

I inherited my granddads Pracktica MTL5 at a young age but really couldn't get my head round the controls. In my early teens I purchased a Pentax P5 from the local paper with the idea of doing a GCSE in Photography. I never did the GCSE and a few months later the camera was back in the local paper.

There was a bit of a gap while I got into computers and went through Uni, then in 2001 after graduating I did some travelling around Asia and purchased a used EOS-5 to accompany me. I loved the EOS and it was the first SLR where I worked out what all the buttons and switches did. My travels left me in Australia for a few years where I reluctantly had to eBay my EOS to get me a flight to Thailand.

Thailand is such a naturally beautiful country I was kicking myself for selling the EOS, and for a year there I was camera-less. It was about this time that digital SLR's were just about becoming affordable and I started looking around. A local Thai photographer was selling a used EOS-20D body and I took it... Wow! What a difference there is between traditional and digital photography.