I was born and bread in South Africa where I grew up and spent my childhood. I will not take up any of your valuable time to ponder over my childhood and adolescence, what I got up to and all the crazy things I did.

But I feel that I have to mention that from early days I was always intrigued and interested in many things and ended up trying lots of different sports and hobbies. So I can gladly say that I have had many great and not so great experiences and learned a lot while doing so.
    

One thing that has always stayed with me is the passion of photography and to take pictures. It has interested me from very early on and even when I was a boy I tried my hand at it. This interest followed me and the day that I took up diving I realized that this was the part of photography that what really appealed to me. Although I continued to take pictures above the water all my time and energy slowly got dragged under water.

Finally when I got more and more into the diving, my underwater photography took off and has grown steadily since. First I started with the Nikkonos system and even started to experiment with early home made housings for normal SLR cameras. This eventually resulted in me owning a few Nikkonos 5 cameras with various Nikkonos strobes. This hobby slowly grew into a total obsession and I started to take photos underwater at every given chance.

But it was not till I left the sheltered world of the South African diving fraternity that I realized what possibilities are out there. After a search to find the ideal diving place in the world I ended up in the Maldives where I was introduced to the European diving world. Boy what a difference and what different possibilities stared me in the face.

I ended up on the idyllic island of Kuredu, at that time the most northern resort island in the Maldives. There I started to work for Prodivers the dive school on the island, where I still am today. The place just grabbed me and I fell totally in love with this paradise island. Although there were many other islands, resorts and dive schools out there, there was nothing that could live up to this establishment and the potential that I saw in this dive school.

Here I met up with some great people that soon became my friends and best of all shared the same interest, photography. Now a totally different world opened up and some of my valued friends, Marc, Bengan and I invested in the then latest Nikon 35mm SLR camera F90 with a Sealux underwater housing. More about the equipment you can read in the equipment section!

This was when the serious photography started and from thereon I never looked back. We were four fanatics, Bengan, Marc, Kimmo Hagman and myself. Now the competition started in earnest and we were in the water taking photos at every given opportunity.

Every year the challenges grew and of course, more and more equipment was available - even this turned into a competition and the pallet of equipment grew.

Now slowly the market is being consumed by digital photography and one can not halt the change. In the end, I could also not fight the inevitable anymore and changed to digital. You can read more about this in the equipment section.

The future for digital photography looks very exciting and there are many new challenges in this fast growing field. Many things have changed with everything turning digital but this in itself opens up many new artistic possibilities. I am looking forward to this challenge and can not wait to dive in.