SuperSheep: Roger Beeden : MAIN PAGE

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Home Country is Australia
Biography: I am lucky enough to have know PJ for a very long time! We hail from the same place and now live in the same country although 2500 km apart. I left Blighty in 1999 because it was full. I miss my friends and family but love the UK all the more as a tourist! I now live in Townsville, Far North Queensland which has 320 days of sunshine per year and no traffic! I am lucky enough to have a beautiful wonderful wife Ally and to have managed to follow my dreams:I currently work for an international coral reef monitoring charity http://www.reefcheckaustralia.org and I love every minute of every day....... See http://www.gardenofbeeden.com for Me, myself and why.
Motto: Humankind has not woven the web of life. We are but one thread within it. Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves. All things are bound together. All things connect. Chief Seattle

If you haven't tasted the fruit then maybe you should.......

http://www.gardenofbeeden.com

I have been taking pictures for many moons. Photography to me is about presenting the snapshots of the world that made me go "Wow". To get all gooey it is also a spiritual thing. In these days when too many people seem to want to kill each other I can't help but remember those evenings I spent as a kid listenting to Davids Attenborough and Bellamy telling us about the amazing world around us.

When I went travelling through SE Asia in 1996/7 I was stuned but the wonder of our world. Totally transfixed by the rugged, vivid beauty of the region and the people. The UK is a wonderful place but is reminds me of a well kept garden. Wilderness is a wonderfull thing. Personally it puts me in perspective and makes me a little more humble. I met my wife Ally en route to Komodo Island in Indonesia. That eery prehistoric place was just like something out of a natuarl history documentary and it filled my heart with a sense of joy that is very difficult to replicate in a pub in London!

So in 1999 I left friends and family and headed to New Zealand with Ally. NZ is very similar to the UK though it is more rugged and unpopulated. Hence the marks of mankind ar few and far between. Anyone who has been there will be astounded by the natural beauty it is truly phenomenal. I n the 5 years I lived there I managed to travel extensively and I am please to say I kept finding new things that made me say "Wow". NZ is a photographer and travellers dream. The people a beautiful and friendly and the countryside is magnificent yet relatively benign. Don't head to NZ for the night life, it's culture is vested in its people's pragmatism and courage rather than the humour and hedonism of the UK. Someone coined the phrase "sNooZeland" to unkindly describe the nighlife but in actual fact you should check out their music and film scene as it is really cool. NZ is my second home but it ain't tropical!

So after many year earning my crusts selling drugs, I finally decided to exercise my brain a little more by undertaking a Masters degree in Marine Biology. I nearly did this in NZ but then decided that if I was going to do it then I would do it properly and go to the GBR which had always been a destination in my mind when I set off in 1996. Anyway 10 years later, I have completed my MAppSc and I now live in Townsville FNQ. My photography habit is becoming ever more of an addiction and I am honing my underwater photography skills whenever possible.

All in all I need photography as an answer to the tendency for pessimism in our time. It's difficult to argue for war in the face of beauty and that is what I try and capture. Whether I achieve it or not is obviously subjective but to me it is a cult of "WoW" that is my interpretation of Gaia / God / Mother Nature or whatever you want to call it. If you enjoy the images let me know.

Gin Gin

Roger over n out
Posted on Thursday, August 17, 2006
By Roger Beeden to Welcome to the Garden of Beeden ~ The cult of WoW