About us and this Website

Maria and I have lived in Terchova, Slovakia for quite a few years now, we have a beautiful traditional timber chalet that we share with our dog Meddy plus a recently acquired cat called Woody, we also have two semi wild cats, Speedy and Ant who live outdoors.
Around the chalet is our organic garden with vegetables, fruit trees and lots of bee loving plants, it would not be complete without the chickens and sheep who keep us in food and four Indian Runner Ducks for slug control, plus bees, all of which keeps us reasonably busy.

We both find time in the good weather for walking and mountain biking, in the winter Maria works as a ski instructor while I am lucky enough to spend most days snowboarding, this is a beautiful country with endless wild areas and we never get tired of finding new places to explore. We also have various indoor hobbies to waste away the time on rainy days.

Throughout my life I have used as much time as I could taking photos and still do whenever possible. I have always had a great love of black and white photography having spent some ten years just taking photos in this medium, so imagine what it was like when I discovered the work of Maria’s grandfather, Milan Saradin, and then to be able to spend time examining his work which dates back to the 1930’s, I was amazed and couldn’t stop looking at the images he had captured throughout his life.

I then decided it would be a wonderful challenge and a great opportunity if I obtained permission to borrow the original negatives and scan them into my computer, it is now finished, there are approximately 7000 images in the collection and the results and detail of how it was all done can be seen at www.milansaradin.com where there are 4000 images.

This past couple of years has certainly restricted the amount anyone can travel but I believe it has in a lot of ways made people look around them and realise there is a lot to see in their local area, we do not have to go very far to find things and places to photograph, we just need to look around us.

I do hope you will find something on these pages of interest to yourself, that will give me the incentive to go out and take many more pictures. Enjoy!!!!!