About Conor MacNeill
Amongst other things, I am a photographer, traveller, developer, musician & fighter. I enjoy all of them.
Originally from Belfast and now living in London, I am primarily a front-end coder for part of the Financial Times Group. I have been involved in the web industry since around 1998. Someone once asked me if I wanted to be a web developer growing up. I explained to them that there was no web growing up. I think there are still some parts of Northern Ireland where people are scared of it.
In previous jobs I have been a cleaner, worked on event security, driven a minibus and been technical support for 1&1 and Apple.
About my photography
I started photography in January 2011. About a month after that, I discovered High Dynamic Range (HDR) photography and have been hooked ever since. So I guess you want to know why I take photos the way I do?
My photos have been described as hyper-real. When I’m taking and processing a photo, I want to try and show what I saw at the time or to try and convey the emotion that the scene gave me. If you look at one of my photos, say of a sunrise, and go, "wow", that’s probably what I said when I saw it. HDR is perfect for this.
Have you ever seen a magnificent sunrise and taken a photo of it? When it comes to showing someone that photo, they are often less than impressed. You then have to qualify it by saying, "You had to be there." I want people to look at my photos and to add that place on to their wish list. If only one of you feels like this, then I think I've done my job.
My photographic passions lie in landscapes, cityscapes and travel photography.
You can find me on these photography-based sites:
If you follow me on one of these websites, I will check out your work, although I can't promise I'll follow you back, as this would quickly get quite impractical. On these social sites, I get quite a lot of emails and I do my best to reply to them all, but it's not always possible. I also get a lot of enquiries saying things like, "I want to buy a camera, which one?" To be honest, I don't really know. It's entirely up to you.
I combined all my best photos from 2011 into one short video, so if you feel like catching up, here it is, if only for the amazing songs by my friends Beccy Owen and the Pannonia Allstars Ska Orchestra.
TheFella Photography on Vimeo.
Travelling
My photography is a great excuse to go travelling. I once made a New Year's resolution to go away every month that year. And that I did. The year before, myself and a friend drove from London to Istanbul and back again. 5500 miles in 12 days is not to be sniffed at.
I have decided that I want to visit every country in the world. Whether this is achievable or not remains to be seen, especially having a full-time job. If you live in a far away country and you want me to take photos of it, then let me know! If you want to provide accommodation and be a tour guide, then even better.
Web Development
I have been involved in the web for over a decade now. What started as a hobby in the 90s has now progressed into a full-time job as a lead front-end developer for an international online publishing firm. I specialise in semantic HTML5, CSS3 and microformats, as well as a healthy dose of responsive web design. I haven't been doing any client work these days, but I still have been githubbing it up. The most recent project was a fork of Andy Clarke's Responsive Type References called Dynamic Responsive Type References which has since been ported back into Andy's new 320 and Up.
Martial Arts
I have been doing martial arts in one form or another since I was a kid. I briefly did Judo, then really got started with Kickboxing and Muay Thai. I then discovered Krav Maga and moved onto Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu and Mixed Marial Arts. I am a member of the British Combat Association and a Senior Instructor for Urban Krav Maga. I currently train in UKM with Head Instructor Stewart McGill and do MMA and BJJ under world champion Leo Negao.
I am available for private tuition in the London area, so if you fancy learning self-defence that's actually useful in a street situation, why not contact me.
Music
I have been known to pick up the odd instrument or two. I currently play the bass, guitar, mandolin, ukulele, jaw harp and… none of them particularly well. I used to dabble around with ambient and electronic music using programs like FL Studio, Cubase and Propellerhead. To check out some of my tracks, you can visit The Fella Goes Arctic.
Colophon
This site was built entirely by me using a PHP5 framework, HTML5 and CSS3. I've tried to make is as fast as possible, as well as making it work across a range of devices. The font is FF Meta Serif Web Pro and it's supplied by Typekit. I had originally used Sirba Web, but it turns out it looks complete ass on Windows. To read more about the building of this site, you can read my blog post on the subject.