My name is Sean Sherstone. I am 39 years old and live in a quaint little town called Ladysmith, named after it’s sister town in Africa. Ladysmith is located towards the Southern end of Vancouver Island in British Columbia, Canada, between Victoria and Nanaimo. Everyday I wake up and look out my window only to be reminded just how fortunate I am to live in such a lush and beautiful area of the world.

I have worked on and off in the printing and graphics industry for over twenty years, most recently I went back to being a graphic designer for a small sign company after spending the last five years being a computer technician. Fighting viruses and replacing crashed hard drives for unhappy owners who had lost their entire collection of family photos had become my rut, so I decided to move back into the creative realm.

I read a great deal about what interests me, when I was younger I always had my nose in a book and would read for hours on end from library books or the World Book encyclopedias that my parents had bought for the family. Fortunately with the advent of the Internet and search engines like the big G my access to information and knowledge has become that much easier.

My only real training in photography has been through reading, along with my experience with graphics and art. I have always had an eye for composition and color which helps a great deal when experimenting.

Like any artist I am in a continual state of learning and progression, I am never satisfied in knowing just a few things and sticking with that. I am always striving to find new ways to produce what is in my mind’s eye.

I have always had a fascination with photography and was exposed to it at an early age because my father was an avid photographer. I experimented with photography seriously in my early teens, creating a pinhole box camera and developing the negative prints in a makeshift darkroom I had set up in the very back corner of the crawl space under our house.

Eventually my father gave me his Mamiya and I used it for many years until one day the mirror fell off during a shoot in winter weather. Film photography has always been an enjoyable but frustrating experience for me. I found taking 36 shots and spending around $10 to get them developed a slow and usually disappointing exercise. Practice makes perfect but when I was in my teens financing my love for photography was not an easy task when I had so many other interests that demanded funds as well. In 1981 my interests were stolen away from photography and I began experimenting with the world of computers. I purchased a Commodore Vic20 and ever since, have dreamed of mixing computers and photography together to create art and imagery.

Little did I know how much computers would influence photography and now today with high quality digital equipment it is almost a necessity to have a computer as a tool to develop and enhance images. My crawl space has become my computer. I have patiently been waiting since 1994 when the first consumer digital camera, the Apple Quick take 100, was released, until a few years ago when digital SLRs became both high quality and reasonably priced enough for me to venture back into photography with a renewed passion.

Since 2005 I have been shooting with Canon equipment. My first experience in the ‘real’ world of photography was being chosen to be one of the “Artists in Residence” for a juried show that the Victoria Maritime Museum organized for the 2005 Tall Ships Festival. Six of my thirteen entered images were chosen to be displayed at the museum and as a result I sold four of the six. Since then my passion has grown into an obsession.

I have chosen to shoot with Canon equipment. My current body is a 30D along with several lenses. The 50mm F1.8, my workhorse the 16-35mm F2.8L II, a 300mm F4L IS, Tamron 28-75mm f2.8 XR Di LD, and finally the sharpest of the bunch a 135mm F2L.

Some of my accessories include an extension tube set from Kenko, a set of Canon 1.4x and a 2x extenders that work with both the 300 and 135 lenses, a remote release and finally an EX420 flash.

Also in my kit are two tripods and a monopod.

The most recent piece of equipment that I am adding to my already heavy kit is a 40D body.

My absolute favorite place to photograph is any one of the rocky beaches that line the island I live on, in the early morning just before the sun rises. During a shooting session I am in a world totally apart from every day worries or troubles, I am in the ‘zone’ and many hours can slip by without me realizing that I have been lying on rocks and they kind of hurt. The ocean and I have an understanding I love watching it through my lens and it continues to rise and fall. I have always tended to lean towards landscape photography but recently I have been experimenting with portrait and people photography. People can be some of the most interesting subjects, the stories and experiences all within a set of eyes are amazing.

Eddie Adams touched my life early on when I was introduced to one of his most famous images, ‘General Nguyen Ngoc Loan executing a Viet Cong prisoner in Saigon’. The image was printed in a hard bound book published by Kodak and it both haunted me and drove me to appreciate photography for the power it possesses in stirring the human psyche.

I have always appreciated and admired Ansel Adams for his ability to manipulate an image long before the advent of computers or digital cameras as well as his impeccable attention to detail.

Probably the biggest person to influence my photography is my father. I can remember as a child sitting through slide shows and flipping through photo albums and every so often catching a glimpse of certain images that are still burned into my mind even today. My father passed away in 1996. He never took up photography professionally but I know he was always passionate about it, that passion has somehow been transferred to me and I thank him for leaving me with that gift.

I joined SmugMug a little over a year ago initially with the intention of doing away with having to redesign my website. Even though I have the skills and knowledge to build my own website from scratch, I actually hate doing that type of computer work. I would much rather be out shooting pictures or working on them in Photoshop, than figuring out how to create a dynamic, easy to update gallery of pictures. With a pro account, the ability to sell my work or even offer direct downloads instead of prints is just icing on the cake for me.

One of my favorite features of SmugMug is the ability to create or join a community of like minded photographers. I have met many new friends that both inspire me and give me even more energy to go out and find that next image, whether it be on the top of a mountain or in the studio.

In the past 15 months I have seen how customer oriented and responsive the team of people behind SmugMug are, they seem to love photography as much as the very people that use it.

SmugMug has given me both the freedom and motivation to go out and shoot regularly, not only because it is so easy to use but because the whole package is wrapped with the passions and interests of many other artists who are just as passionate towards their craft as I am.

First of all never give up on your dreams. If you want something bad enough you will find a way to make it happen. Find out what you like about photography the most, keep practicing and learning the techniques behind what makes a photo something to remember, what it takes to stir the human psyche to remember a special time in their life, or wish they were there with you on the top of the very mountain that you climbed to capture your mind’s eye.