I've always wanted to explore, drawn by a curiosity of both the natural and man-made world. I grew up reading the books of Arthur Ransome and the stories of explorers such as Captain Cook and Ernest Shackleton. As I've traveled, I've taken a camera with me to capture my perspective.
There are some out there that complain about people like me, experiencing life through a small glass screen. But they miss the point. It's looking at those photographs that allow the memory to retrieve the experiences. Without the visual aid, the memories are often opaque if they can be conjured at all.
In my very early days, I'd borrow my mother's Kodak Instamatic. Even then the urgency that now permeates everyday life existed in me. Waiting for the prints to come back was torture. I progressed through various SLR cameras and on to slide or transparency film but I still had to wait for the results.
And so I took to Black and White, learning how to process the film and make prints in my own darkroom. I got into digital just after the turn of the century following the birth of my son. That decision saved me an absolute fortune on film and allowed me to document not only his path to adulthood but that of his sister who arrived two years later.
Originally from the UK, I've now settled in katy, Texas. I got here by way of spells in the Libyan desert, the South African veldt, the Bruneian jungle, the Libyan desert (again), the olive groves of Tunisia, the port city of Dubai, the desert hinterland of Oman and the streets of Paris, France. (Put that itinerary and Houston together and you get oil – my undergrad was in Geophysics).
That largely explains why my commercial photography projects to date have tended to the engineering and manufacturing industries. I also enjoy concert and dance photography, approaching both as a sport rather than an art.
In recent years, arthritis has attacked my knees so I'm not able to hike like I used to. I now take a gentler path and seek vistas available to most via a car and a short walk (though I love looking at the exotic travel and wilderness photos of others).
In 2022 I had both knees replaced, my right at the end of January and my left at the end of November. That's a dynamic of the us health care system where replacing both in the same calendar year reduced my out-of-pocket costs – what I had to pay vs. what my medical insurance had to pay.
2023 was spent rehabbing, and now in 2024 I feel ready to return to photography once more.