Hello! My name is Colin Smedley and I live in Coningsby, Lincolnshire, England. However, just about everyone except the tax man knows me as "Oscar" (this is a nickname I acquired in the RAF during the 1960s and was never able to get away from).

I am a freelance photojournalist and am into all the things mentioned above and loads of other things, too. I've been taking photos of aircraft since about 1955 and the filing cabinet's nearly full now!

I'm registered with the PAGB, NEMPH and the LPA as a lecturer and judge for photographic competitions. I was a member of the Royal Photographic Society but I never got around to applying for a distinction and I resigned in 2000 for several reasons that seemed appropriate at the time. I was an electronic technician in the RAF for 28 years so I reckon I know a bit about aircraft, too! In recent years I've become interested in natural history photography. My favorite subjects in this discipline being butterflies, fungi and birds of prey. I now use a computer to prepare images for printing, either by inkjet or by scanning laser technology onto normal colour paper at my local lab. I'm convinced that this gives better results from transparencies than either internegatives or reversal printing.