About me
I live in Macclesfield and have been taking photographs for many years now. Like many people, I started working with film and I had my own darkroom for a number of years where I produced a few passable B&W prints. However, I really struggled to realise the image I had in my mind and for a long while felt very frustrated. It was only through going digital in 2000 that I have been able to produce the sort of images I only dreamt about.I have progressed through a variety of cameras and currently use a Nikon D300s with a range of Nikon and Sigma lenses.
I work in both B&W and colour and if you look over my site you will find that there are a number of what could be called "straight" images, but much of what I have displayed have been manipulated in someway. Whilst many workers will cite other photographers as their source of influence, I feel my work is has been informed more by painters, particularly the Symbolists and Expressionist. If I had to pick specific painters then Caspar David Friedrich and Vilhelm Hammershoi are artist whose work I greatly admire. They both managed to create a sense of stillness and tranquillity whilst coupling this with a feeling of unease and uncertainty.
Recently I have become interested in the Pictorialist photographers who were pioneers of art photography in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. What particularly attracts me to there images is the way they used texture and surface manipulation to create a painterly effect or often the look of an etching: something I have tried to do with some of my digital images.