So this is my blog.
My name is Paul Jackson. I live in the south east of England. I work as a quality manager in a small company that specialises in the manufacture of stainless steel tube.
My time away from work is generally spent enjoying one (or as I recently found, a mixture) of the following activities:
Skateboarding, photographing skateboarding or photographing wildlife. I imagine that these subjects will fill the majority of this blog, but I concede that it may well grow into something completely different, in time.
What prompted me to start this blog was my desire to show off, essentially. Show off the things I am most proud of; my friends, the things we do and the wonders of life that await us outside our doors.
Until this point, I have been showing off via other mediums. Facebook, Flickr and more recently Instagram, until a friend suggested this.
I am currently 36 years of age and I've been skating for around 27 years.
Last March I had planned a short solo skate mission to a small skate park on the north Norfolk coast in a small town called Mundesley.
I left that park with torn ligaments, tendons and muscles around my right ankle and a broken fibula.
Although the injury was going to stop me from skating for the best part of 12 months, I didn't allow it to prevent me from enjoying that thing that has been constant in my life since my seventh birthday. So soon after my coming home from a short spell in hospital and an operation to correct the bone in my right calf and to put two screws in my ankle, I was up and about on crutches and in my friend's car on the way to a skatepark.
I found this to be the therapy, and motivation I needed to get me fit again and after taking my camera along I knew I was onto something.
Photography is something I have always enjoyed from an early age, I remember being given my first camera by my parents. An early Kodak Instamatic I think. It's still kicking around somewhere.
On my first attempt at shooting skateboarding, even though I had woefully inadequate camera gear for the job, I was still very pleased with the results. This was the only encouragement I needed to upgrade my gear and start snapping! Realistically, this injury at this point in my life was surely going to restrict me in the kind of skating I was going to be able to commit fully to, however hard I wished otherwise and something that could not only fill the void, but hold my interest was essential.
The wildlife photography side of it all came from sitting in my back garden and being amazed at how many birds there were, actually in my garden.
I live in a small Suffolk town, on a busy main road leading to the town centre. So most of the time I was at home recuperating, I found myself listening to a much more peaceful and musical environment outside of rush hours.
I bought a bird feeder and some food and waited.
If you feed them, they will come! In all shapes and sizes. this led to excursions to a nearby river, and so on.
So this is it.
The start of something that I hope you enjoy reading and something I will enjoy writing.
