There is a high chance you already know me, since this site, while SEO optimised, is not promoted via social media. If you know me, then that will be obvious why.
If you don't know who I am, then you won't find out much here, as I prize my privacy and work to preserve it.
I have always been fascinated by the natural world, and the beauty to be found every day in the small things we share the world with. Much of that beauty we can't see with the naked eye, the scales on a butterflies wing or the twist of a stamen. I try to capture the environment from landscapes down to the microscopic details in a flower so others might share what I find.
I was given my first camera at the age of 11, and I've always owned one since. My career has always featured colour or images in some way, but only since about 2015 with digital cameras and time have I started to seriously catalogue local biodiversity. Initially so I could show my nephew the beauty his generation and later may lose, but he now has his own camera and interest in the natural world. These images started as a catalogue, but are not pure record shots, they are portraits, even if my subjects don't talk back to me.
I'm a strongly ethical photographer, none of the subjects here were harmed except some of the flowers which were picked specifically for shooting. Most of the other flowers, fungi and wildlife were shot in the wild, and left for others to enjoy. I do not practise or condone techniques like freezing insects in order to slow them down. I would rather lose an image than cause distress or harm.
The images are mostly shot digitally. A few film scans may sneak in. Each page has selected EXIF information presented as notes, which I hope is helpful to understand what is going on sometimes with a shot.
I have also now started to upload videos. These are only going to be short clips, and they are intended to support the portfolio, not be primary works in themselves I am not a videographer Though as a child I did want to make films, the technology at the time was costly, particularly in materials like film. Nowadays it would be easy to get into, but to do it well takes a lot of commitment that I am aware of, and not really sure I want. Videos are not licensed automatically because they are not the primary works here, though that may change if I start to get into video properly at some point.
The images and videos are responsive and will scale according to your screen size, well the images will, the video does in Safari, but you can only do responsive video in Firefox and Chrome based browsers via javascript, for reasons I will not go into here. All images are published with the
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
This allows non commercial copying for personal use, without editing, nor using it in your own artworks. Printing is fine for personal use, and the largest JPEGs will print ok at about A5 size. You may need to apply colour management or sharpening for printing as part of your output, but I consider that acceptable. Note the images have sometimes had sharpening added for web display, so you may need to contact me for a print ready file if they look wrong when printed. Now that I am looking to sell prints via galleries and exhibitions, then I'm removing the larger images and if you would like a proper print then please see the print order page.
If you would like to print larger than A5, or to buy a larger print, or you would like to sell prints then contact me and I will talk to you about that.
Similarly if you have a commercial use for my work, then I am open to genuine approaches.
Anything that is not people. Architecture to Zoology.
I shoot a lot of macro and wildlife because I've always loved nature and it intrigues me to find things the eye cannot easily see. Or see at all. Which is pretty much my definition of macro, it needs to show things that are not easily visible to the naked eye, whether that is details of the subject or the subject completely.
When shooting macro I try to be non destructive of wild subjects. I have been known to buy flowers to shoot, and I don't feel too bad about that, but the practises of capturing and killing, or allegedly non-harmfully cooling subjects I do not support. A lot of images I have seen come from those, and I would rather miss the shot.
I do tend to try and shoot gigantic panoramas. I have this ambition to be able to create photos which are the size of normal windows, and can be used to open up walls in rooms with few or no windows. Technology is not really at the point where this is easy though, and even a top of the range computer starts gasping with the amount of data. There is then the matter of finding a suitable printer, and running test prints and so on.
So although I can create images that would print to those sizes, and I have some examples, I have not yet reached the point of putting them on a wall.
Although much modern art leaves me cold, I do like abstracts, particularly with lots of patterns. I did a short course on this a couple of years ago, which was a bit frustrating, but it did give me some ideas to push myself, and also, usefully, pointed out that image quality is sometimes the enemy of a good image.
This site is hosted online with the absolute minimum of online jiggery pokery. The pages are either hand crafted, as this one was, or are automatically generated with an offline script. There is no online computation of the site, and all pages are CSS only with NO Javascript.
The philosophy was quite simple. From a security perspective anything hosted publicly is static and when served over HTTPS, as this site is, is hard to hack. Not impossible, though the NSA attack on SSL has mostly gone away. There is no DB anywhere connected to the web to attack, no forms, no SQL injection vectors. There is no need therefore to regularly patch servers running CGI from a scripting perspective, and the hosting company are responsible for patching OS and web server. Meaning I can concentrate on features and most importantly the photos.
I decided to avoid Javascript for a number of reasons. While it has contributed to making sites more dynamic, it is often misused, and can become a client side maintenance problem. The HTML5 / CSS 3.0 approach I have followed here hopefully works on most browsers, on most OS and hardware. It is not the lowest common denominator, but it is not far off.
The design is intended to be accessible, SEO optimised and responsive, all without Javascript. Since I am not a web designer, it may have bugs, but I hope not. It does not have any social media integration, and social media bots are banned from the site, so I have no idea if you share URLs what might come up.
The colour scheme, backdrops and general layout are based on the idea of seeing pictures hanging on a wall at home. After the exhibition and a couple of trips, the design is now changed to use white mounts, and black frames, optionally borderless, as I used in the exhibition. The portfolio pages are based on the idea of slides on a lightbox, and the homepage is primarily just an index to the parts of the site.
Navigation images were custom made a long time ago using PostScript to generate the images. This was resurrected and updated for this site. Similarly the slide frames were generated in PostScript They have recently been replaced using SVG hand crafted graphics based on the original PostScript drawings.
Typography is preferentially GillSans, this being a pretty common typeface, and one I tend to use for my personal work. I like the cleanliness of it.
I provide RSS and Atom feeds if you want to follow me. Despite the crippling of these technologies in Safari, there are still plenty of apps around where you can add your own feeds.
Assuming you found this site without my help, unlikely as that seems, then for enquiries about pretty much anything photography related, for licensing or reuse queries or even for bug reports, you may send me an email at
@
Note, due to some trickery here you cannot cut and paste the email addresses on this site, nor is it a link. Sorry. However it isn't hard to type. The idea being to reduce the amount of spam. Please note this address is also subject to change if it does attract spambot attention.