Amanda Hides was born on May 1, 1980 in Brisbane, Australia as the youngest daughter of Linda and Gordon Hides. She has one sister who is a contributor to iStock too under the name of 'Rinelle'.
Because of her fathers profession as a fish breeder, who needed a clean water supply which was hard to get near towns, she spent most of her childhood in various country locations on the east coast of Queensland. Her upbringing was pretty unique in many ways. She has lived without electricity, hot water and sewage, and spent a few years in an 8 man tent, cooking outside.
Amanda did her schooling (grade 2-10) by home schooling because the family was often far away from schools. When she finished grade 11 and 12, she moved back down to Brisbane so she could go to the university. Amanda got a bachelors degree in information technology (computers), majoring in information management.
After she graduated, Amanda worked at various libraries and a few other part time jobs. But she didn't fell good in a salary based environment (she worked too hard, and ended up doing everyone else jobs as well as her own). After that, Amanda worked on her parents property for a few months, but moving back into home after you have left is never easy, so she came back down to Brisbane and did some internet based technical support. But this was shift work, and because of her strong internal clock, she kept getting sick doing this kind of work. So she decided to start her own business.
She had been doing Photoshop a lot just out of interest, and believed she was of a reasonably professional level, so she started offering her services as a digital retoucher to professional photographers in her area. Some were interested and Amanda started getting a bit of business, enough for a comfortable part time wage, if not a full time one.
While she was doing this, she discovered iStock, and started uploading and learning. Than she gave her husband Michael, with who she married in 2001 and hence became Amanda Rohde, a bit of a surprise when she said she wanted to ditch her business and start doing iStock full time. Now, a little more than 3 years later, she is one of iStocks most successful photographers, totaling over 245.000 downloads with a portfolio of more than 7400 images.
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above and beneath :
Young Amanda at the age of 4 (above) and 11 (below) at her fathers farm.
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