about fotomat
fotomat is a personal website that is hosted, designed and curated by Mike Tadman.
I’m a retired IT professional. Since giving up full-time work in September 2022, I have taken up photography as a hobby. This website provides a way for me to document the process of learning the art of photography, website design and record some of the interesting places and sights that I have visited along the way.
I currently use the following equipment, cameras, lenses and software to build this site:
Hardware:
- Canon EOS 1DX MK I
- Canon EOS 5D MK I
- Canon zoom lens EF 24-105mm
- Canon zoom lens EF 100-400mm
- Canon 1.4x Extender MK 1
- Canon SpeeLlite 430EXII flash
Software:
Where possible I try to achieve my design goals using free open source software. There are many great commercial software tools out there, that have widespread appeal to the professional photographic community. However, I prefer to spend my limited budget on good quality camera equipment and use my IT skills and free open source software tools to get the best results I can. Here are the tools I used to build this website:
- Rawtherapee: open source, cross-platform raw image processing software (https://www.rawtherapee.com)
- WordPress: (https://wordpress.org)
- Astra WordPress theme – free version (https://wpastra.com)
- Elemantor – free version (https://en-gb.wordpress.org/plugins/elementor/).
- Canva (https://www.canva.com/)
- Gimp (https://www.gimp.org/