His fellow countrymen know him as Ian Macdonald-Smith, but to the manufacturer of Olympus camera equipment the Bermudian professional photographer is known as a 'Visionary' — just one of 18 whose work the company admires enough to use in marketing its products.

Mr. Macdonald-Smith is also one of 12 'Team Nik' photographers known as 'beta testers' for Nik Software, the company producing Viveza — easy to use, plug-in technology for Photoshop and Aperture, which allows photographers of all skills and levels to isolate objects or regions they wish to enhance in their images, and control colour and light, so that their work looks completely natural.

As one of the 'beta testers', Mr. Macdonald-Smith gets to use the equipment before it is put on the market and then provides performance feedback to the company — something he also does for Olympus and Tamrac camera bags.

To his delight, one of the local cameraman's images is now being used by Nik in its current advertising campaign in international and digital imaging magazines, including the coveted back cover of 'Outdoor Photographer' and opposite the editorial in 'Photoshop'.

Featuring a sunset vista on the Isle of Man, the photograph was captured while Mr. Macdonald-Smith was working on his project about M.H. Baillie Scott, a very significant arts and crafts architect whose career began there.

"He influenced people like Frank Lloyd Wright, Charles Rennie Mackintosh, Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe — the whole Bauhaus movement, and I am photographing and writing for a book which Rizzoli International will publish in 2010," he says.