About this website

This site was launched in 2009 and since then I’ve made a lot of photographs. Some fit comfortably with the current framework and some are new subjects and new ideas. So here we have some new galleries, and a few have gone. I’ve added new images to most portfolios and removed some material that’s either been around a very long time, or simply to reflect that I can do better now. I hope you agree. All told about 40% of the photographs on the site now are newly featured.

It is possibly more difficult to select the galleries and individual images for a website like this than it was to make the photographs to begin with. It’s not the including that’s the problem. It’s the excluding.

I want to include photographs that reach back to my heritage as a colour landscape photographer, but I also need to demonstrate the directions in which my work has developed these last few years. This has meant abandoning as inadequate the purely geographical focus of my first site and instead I’ve adopted a series of themes. The galleries on this site reflect pretty well the process I use to plan a year’s photography. – deciding first what I want to photograph and secondarily where I need to go to get it done, not the other way round. So after some thought I ended up with 21 galleries. I hope each of these has some internal consistency of subject or approach. Maybe both if I got lucky.

Within each of these galleries, which photographs to display? I’ve been a serious photographer for a while, making perhaps five thousand photographs a year; so I’ve had lots to choose from and it was hard to decide and harder still to stick with those choices as other candidates, temporarily forgotten, emerged. My big fear is not of including photographs that aren’t likeable- it is of omitting the photograph or series that would completely change someone’s views of the worth of what I do. But with today’s web design technology and the fact that most of my better work is or has been digitised , the consequences of mistakes are less enduring than they were. So I’ve mainly gone with photographs that I thought I liked best, and the job got done.

About the photographs

I wrote this for my first website in 2001:-

"Though my objectives for each gallery are somewhat different, overall I aim to create strong vibrant images that are comfortable to look at because they are well balanced in terms of structure, colour and form. A photograph should express itself as a complete, harmonious and interesting whole that will stand the test of time."

"I work in natural light, trying always to photograph a subject in conditions that fully realise its pictorial potential. I try to achieve a strong graphic quality in my work, and simplicity is an overt goal. I try consciously to omit elements from my photographs unless I feel they can contribute positively to its success."

It’s all still appropriate. What I photograph might have changed quite a bit since 2001, but the essential aim is the same. Equally I still much prefer making photographs to agonising over equipment. Although about half of the photographs on this site were made with medium format film, commercial considerations dictate that today I use digital cameras of varying sizes and shapes. But I can't tell you that I’m much attached to cameras, and I always feel that I’m coming from behind on anything technical, whether hardware or software.

About the photographer

I've lived in Datchet, a village on the Thames west of London with my wife Jane, since 1975. Two of our three daughters live with us and the other fairly close by in London. Before I gave up a business career in 1997 to photograph and write, I had half a career in various marketing and business management roles with large multinationals, and a few years as Director and part owner of a Marketing Services business which turned out to be quite successful. It all seems such a long time ago, and for better or occasionally for worse, I’m a photographer now.