About

You could say I was born to the smell of darkroom chemicals as my father was working as a portrait photographer at the time and his darkroom was in the basement of our rented London flat.

My first camera was a Zenit B and I remember being very proud of a picture I took in our local park of a winter tree silhouetted against stormy grey clouds - I was ten at the time!

However, my interest lay dormant for the next 25 years, until I joined the Swindon Camera Club (now 'upgraded' to the Swindon Photographic Society).

I learnt a lot from the other members and also read photographic magazines avidly. In 1992 I gained my Licentiateship from the Royal Photographic Society (LRPS) and a year later my Associateship (ARPS).

After 15 years of membership my interest began to wain a little, to be revived with a vengeance by the advent of the digital age. My first encounter with digital came through winning a HP Photosmart 618 compact in a photographic competition. It was only 2 megapixels and by today's standards the quality was awful - but I was hooked!

In the summer of 2005 I re-mortgaged the house (no kidding!) and splashed out on my first digital kit - a Canon EOS 1Ds MkII. This has since been replaced by a Canon 5D MkII.

For those of you who are interested in this kind of thing - my current lenses are the Canon 24-105 f4L IS USM and the Canon EF 100-400mm f4.5-5.6 L IS USM. Most, if not all of the images in the 'Botanica' galleries were taken with the Canon 100mm f2.8 USM macro lens. I also have a Sigma 12-24mm f4.5-5.6 DG EX lens, but I seldom use it - I find the distortion at the widest end a bit too much for my liking. I always use a tripod for landscape and macro work and the Manfrotto Neotech, whilst not the lightest, is sturdy and a doddle to set up and collapse quickly. I have the usual range of landscape filters, although I often bracket exposures and then merge different images in Photoshop to get a high dynamic range, rather than using neutral grads - my feeling is that having spent a fortune on top quality lenses, do I then want to degrade the image by putting some more glass/resin in front of the optic? But this varies according to my mood. OK - enough of the techie stuff!

The purchase of all that high end kit marked my transition from 'amateur' to 'professional' when I started submitting images to magazines (see Publications) and to Alamy, an online stock library (see Links) in earnest. Freelance photography - and journalism - is now, very nearly, my full time occupation. In 2013 I gained my AFIAP - 'Artiste de la Federation de l'Art Photographique' an international distinction gained by getting the requisite number of acceptances in international salons and exhibitions.

Most of the images are available for sale for editorial or commercial use. Please contact me via the Contact page.