TL;DR: Ian Darwin. Photographer. IT Guy. Writer. Voyager. I live between Alliston, Orangeville, Beeton and Bolton, north of Toronto, Canada. I create portraits of people, places, and sometimes events. I also do photojournalism. Mostly I work locally but, for the right price, "have gear, will travel."
Background: My dad was a civil engineer with an eye for detail, and, an inveterate photographer. He started with a 120 roll film camera; while I was growing up he graduated to a series of Polaroid cameras. As an engineer he was primarily concerned with photography as documentation rather than photography as art. You can see some of Dad's work in this on Flickr stream. The original B&W prints were digitized for posterity by the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto)
Vision: I have been photographing the world around me since I was a camera geek with a Nikon F working on the high school yearbook, long worlds ago. No, wait, it started before that - I was 12 and somehow got hold of a Minox "spy camera". Or was it the plastic Argus flash camera my parents gave me when I was seven that started it? No matter. My early thoughts on photography as art were also influenced by an original print of Wallace MacAskill's famous work Gray Dawn (1921) which hung in my family's home as I was growing up. There were several paintings, but there was only one photograph that was considered "artistic" enough to have a place on the wall.
The fascination of controlling the interactions of people/places/things with light and film and settings viewed through the viewfinder has never faded, though many technologies have come and gone. When I started as a high-school yearbook photog, there was barely auto-exposure (and certainly no auto-focus), and everything was done on 35mm film. So you had to think whether each click of the shutter would be likely to have a worthwhile result. Photography was expensive; we refilled our own film cannisters with bulk film, and developed our own black-and-white pictures in the (non-digital!) darkroom.
Things have changed since then. I take lots of pictures. My work has appeared in The Toronto Sun, The Times of New Tecumseth and Tottenham, and elsewhere.
My vision tends to the realistic rather than the fantastic; starkly impossible colors painted in the computer are not what my photography is about. Capturing the world as I see it, and as I believe people with normal vision see it, is.
If you want me to photograph a person, place, or thing, please use this contact form, or just email me by my first name at the domain of this web site!
Technical: If you are hiring me (or any photographer), you probably shouldn't care whether I use Nikon, Canon, or Sony, anymore than you should care whether someone you hire to write a book does so on a Mac, MS Windows, Linux, or OpenBSD. Nikon, Canon, Sony, Fuji, Hasselblad and others make perfectly fine professional-quality cameras. If you are a photo geek, know that I am an unrepentant Nikon shooter; Nikons are known for quality and reliability. I also believe in redundancy, so at a photo shoot you won't see me without at least two cameras, two lenses, several batteries, multiple flashes, etc. Just in case, say, space aliens descend on me and decide to take my trusty Nikon back to planet Zyxjqqzzia for some quick vacation shots.
Legal: IanDarwinPhoto.com is owned and operated by Rejminet Group Inc.