Leo's Website

About

Rute Martins

~*~ Welcome to Leo’s Website ~*~

I always enjoyed taking photos as a youngster but never really considered making it a hobby or a profession, mainly because I was too naive to even think that either was possible. I owned a Nikon film camera which took really awesome photos. My saddest recollection of the camera was when I went to my birthplace in Madeira for the first time since I left, and I was snapping away the whole day, until I realised I hadn’t changed film for quite a while. When I looked, I noticed that there was no film in the camera. Fortunately those memories are embedded in my mind. I became sort of anti-cameras after that.

A few years ago, a friend of mine introduced me to flickr and she bought me my first flickr account. If you look at my flickr photostream, you will notice the change in my type of photography from the time I first started posting to today. The more I took photos, the more I enjoyed it again. My first digital camera was an Olympus C21. With my partners constant encouragement and support, I moved onto a Konica Minolta DSLR-Like DiMage A200, then onto a Canon 400D and now a Canon 5D MKII.

I attended a basic photography course just to get the basics of manual shooting. Although I found it helpful, in hindsight it wasnt comprehensive enough and that I found out very quickly from a friend of mine who is a photographer (his website: Fletcher’s Photography). He was kind enough to give me the basic rundown on studio photography and subsequently proceeded to ask me various questions that I could not answer. Although demoralising, it was also a challenge for me, one that I am sure I will eventually get the hang of, with some more tuition. He exercised a lot of patience as did my partner who had to model for me.

I currently live in one of the most beautiful parts of the Eastern Cape in South Africa called Jeffreys Bay. Daily I come across places, situations, events, etc, where a photographer can spend endless hours snapping away. I mostly enjoy taking macro photos, landscape, birds, seascape, animals, basically anything that I come across. I would like to get into studio photography so I can interact with people at the same time.

So I am very much an amateur photographer at this stage.

Hope you enjoy viewing the photos as much as I enjoyed capturing them!

Rute
aka }Leo{