My name is Chris Grady and I was born in Somerset in 1958 to a farming family spending my entire childhood being brought up in the beautiful English countryside and my love for it has always stayed with me. At the age of sixteen I moved to Hereford and have remained here ever since. After leaving school I became an Agricultural Engineer and later moving into management in the motor parts industry. In 1994 I went into business for nearly twelve years and at the end of 2005 sold it and am now semi-retired. Now I spend all of my time doing all of those things I love to do - Skiing, fishing, walking, but mainly wildlife photography.

I am by no means an accomplished photographer, just a mere beginner so don't expect too much. But as my experience grows the results are improving, as you will see from some of my latest work. I did dabble in SLR Photography many years ago but have only been taking holiday and family snaps with various compact cameras since then.

About four years ago I bought my first digital camera, a Nikon Coolpix 7900 to use on a holiday in the Canadian Rockies and I got some fabulous results. In fact it gave me the bug again after almost 20 years! The reason I hadn't taken the plunge with digital before was I didn't think the quality could match that of film without paying mega bucks for a top end camera. But now digital has caught up and surpassed the bounds of traditional film photography and will carry on improving in performance and at the same time reducing in cost which will make quality photography available to more and more people.

For about two and a half years now I have been the proud owner of a digital SLR camera, lenses up to 600mm, an A3 colour printer, photo editing software and various other bits and pieces. There's no stopping me now! Just a very steep learning curve to overcome, with problems ranging from - How to get up close to your subject, through to adjusting poorly exposed images, with many, many more trials and tribulations in between before you can say you are happy with the finished print!

I have acquired some Digiscoping Equipment and have been trying the method out to see if it is possible to get quality images at a lot further distances from the subject than you can with an SLR. There are separate Galleries at the end of Bird Images containing my first Digiscoped Images straight from the camera so you can see what you make of the image quality compared with DSLR photography.