About Our Australian Bird Photo Prints

Garry (Gazz ) Chapple:

I have been working in IT for many years, around 30 in fact, requiring me to have highly developed and multidisciplinary skills and knowledge, including general IT, cloud services, and website and intranet development, to mention a few.

Over the years I accrued a considerable amount of experience in general multimedia and web design, including popular applications like Adobe lightroom & photoshop, Affinity photo, and Davinci resolve for video editing. With regards to website development, I enjoy and am well versed in the provisioning, development, and management of WordPress based websites, another passion of mine!

I have enjoyed photography for a very long time and in recent years have become more keenly focused on professional photography and image production, and although I enjoy the technical side of photography in post production and editing, I have also developed a passion for the artistic and creative side of photography, which leads us to where we are today. Cathy and I recently returned from touring this amazing continent with our pop-top caravan and Canon camera equipment to see what we might discover. We have decided to settle in Hobart, beautiful Tasmania, to be closer to our son and his partner.

Cathy Chapple:

Cathy has been a health professional her entire career as a registered nurse. However, in parallel to her work life she has also been an avid artist enjoying drawing and painting in such mediums as watercolour and acrylic paint. Her art website is coming soon!

Cathy has also been a keen photographer for some years and we have both very much enjoyed our photo-shoots in and around the Northern Territory, and now in Tasmania. We hope you enjoy our website and if you’re looking for some beautiful wildlife images to brighten your day to day, please do consider one of our prints.

Thanks, Gazz and Cathy Chapple.

In my early days of photography I used a 12 Megapixel Pentax DSLR with a very “budget” 300mm zoom kit lens. However, I was pleasantly suprised at the quality of images I was able to achieve with it, although the lens was a quite soft at the high end of the zoom. It wasn’t long before the photography bug bit, and once I reached the limitations of the older Pentax it was time to start looking at something a little more modern.

Enter Canon’s very popular EOS 80D. This was the most recent, what I liked to call Pro-sumer, DSLR model in their range at the time, having only just being released to the market. You can imagine my excitement when using this camera for the first time, a 24 Megapixel DSLR that was almost professional grade, Almost!

As primarily a bird and wildlife photographer, the next logical step was to get a lens that would give me more reach and higher image quality for my photos. However, a visit to the local cannon store and seeing the cost of Canons L series lenses quelled my excitement very quickly. Not that I begrudged Canon the asking price, they were just significantly out of my price range. The only solution then was to buy a third party lens, but even that made my credit card weep at the time! In the end I settled for a Tamron 150-600mm GII EF mount lens, which I have to say served me well for some years.

So back to today, Dec 2024.
Cathy and I started our Australian tour with the trusty R7 mirrorless cameras, she using the MKII 100-400mm L series lens and me with the RF 100-500 L series. The R7 is great but as with most cameras it has it’s weaknesses, one being it’s erratic auto focus in low light. The R7 has been a fantastic workhorse, but a few months ago we decided to get serious and so moved to the Canon R5, a genuine professional level camera. Below is the current status of our photography equipment (Ouch)$. 😂

• 2 X Canon R5 cameras
• 2 X Canon R7 cameras  (hot spares)
• 2 X Canon RF 100-500mm f4.5-7.3 L series telephoto lenses
• 1 x Canon EF 100-400mm f/4.5-5.6 MKII L series telephoto lens
• 1 x Canon RF 200-800mm f/6.3-9 telephoto lens
• 1 X GoPro Hero 11