Artist Statement

Welcome, and thank you for visiting my website. I am a photographer based close to the stunning Solway estuary in Dumfries & Galloway.

My first camera was a Kodak 35mm given to me by my dad back in 1960. In 1980 I moved to the parish of Ruthwell in Dumfries & Galloway. I have had many more cameras along the way, and gained experience of developing and printing mono photographs in the dark room of the Dumfries Museum. I then bought second hand dark room equipment from the local camera club auctions to fit out my own small dark room, spending many hours learning the art of dodging and burning.

I printed mono prints from a variety of film, Kodak infra-red, fast film, grainy film you name it I tried it. Once printed I then hand tinted some of them with food dyes and various toners. On the front of the camera I used a variety of different filters to great effect.

I have loved taking pictures of every subject from babies, family portraits, children dressed in period costume, and animals (particularly dogs) , then on to photo-journalism having taken a writing course. This led to meeting and photographing a lot of really interesting people, including a woodcarver,a gunmaker, a gamekeeper, a fisherman and a falconer which led to many published articles.

Another form of photography was organizing models and then producing the images for a clothes brochure. Took me a while to embrace the new digital era! Just love it now.

These days I have a small garden-studio where I can chill-out and experiment using soft pastel chalks,acrylics and graphite pens, embracing new techniques combining artwork together with mixed digital media using 'Photoshop' and 'On1 RAW' software.