Welcome to my website! I’m a sixty-something gentleman of English upbringing, though I am in fact also half-Irish, and have lived in Northern Ireland since 2003 when I married Jude. We live on the Antrim Coast in a lovely house owned by our cat Ollie.
I am a 6-year Past President of the Irish Astronomical Association (IAA) and in 2019 I took up the Chair of the Irish Federation of Astronomical Societies for 3 years having been Secretary for the previous 5 years. I am currently Vice-Chairman of that group. I have also been Webmaster of the IAA since 2009 and this site has evolved through HTML/CSS, Drupal 7 and WordPress incarnations over the years.
I took up photography initially in 1971 using my father’s Exa 1B camera then had a succession of cameras of my own – A Kodak Instamatic 33, Cosmic 35, Iloca rangefinder, Pentax PC35 AF-M, then in the late ’80s I went into SLRs with a Minolta X-300.
Having been through Minolta AF and Dynax cameras and then to Konica Minolta and Sony DSLRs, these days I use Lumix mirrorless cameras, loving the size and weight of the cameras and especially the lenses. The ability to use old lenses has almost become a separate hobby in itself! I also own a medium format Minolta Autocord from 1956 which I try and use at least once a year too. Using a fine-grained negative film, a tripod, a cable release and professional scanning I can get results from this that are at least as good as a modern digital.
I work as an Operations Engineer in the TV and Radio business having pursued a varied career which has included IT management in both Projects and Support capacities in various organisations, though I’ve always managed to end up back in Broadcasting – there is no escape! I have now gone part-time with a view to adjusting my work-life balance.
Paul Evans, Ballygally, April 2025