Who I am, where I live, what I do, my equipment: all this info and more can be found in the "About" section, or by clicking here.

    Why "TheRoyalOlive.com"? The name of this site comes from my last name, Oliveira. Oliveira is a very common name in countries that have or have had strong cultural influences from the Portuguese. Such nations include Portugal, obviously, Angola and Brazil. In Portuguese, Oliveira means olive tree. The name has an ancient history that links back to Jews that immigrated to Portugal a few hundred years ago, where they were forced to convert to Catholicism. In order to preserve their Jewish identities, they adopted tree names in their family names. Other examples are Pereira (pear tree) and Carvalho (oak tree). Such names, particularly "Oliveira," are exceptionally common in countries heavily influenced by the Portuguese and hardly reflect their bearers' religious views.

Even being quite common, I like my last name very much. Hence, I wanted to create a site that had some connection to it. There are many "oliveira" related websites out there, so it was hard to decide on a fitting name. I also did not want to have anything specifically related to photography in the name (such as oliveiraphoto.com, which is probably taken anyway), therefore I had to come up with something more original. "Royal" was an interestiong choice, and I decided to use it with a shortened version of Oliveira because English speaking people cannot spell it properly (Oliveria and Oliviera are common spelling errors). RoyalOlive.com was taken, so someone suggested the inclusion of "the" at the beginning. theroyalolive.com was available, so I registered it!