I am a physicist, retired but still keeping my hand in doing research on things related to the aurora (northern lights).

I spend about half the year on Manitoulin Island in Ontario, and that is where most of my pictures are taken.

Although I have been taking pictures most of my life, it is only in the past couple of years, after getting a digital camera, that I have started experimenting, and daring to try photos that previously would just never have occurred to me.

As to my approach to photography, most of the time I just play with my camera and see what happens. In a different context just before I started using Flickr, I wrote the following: I get tremendous pleasure from finding interesting and beautiful effects in light, in the patterns of nature, in the common objects around me, and seeing if I can capture what I see and feel in a picture. There is great satisfaction on those few occasions when I look at an image and can say, "Yes, that's what I saw and felt!"

I have also had a life-long interest in classical music, and as an adult have been an amateur musician, first playing recorders, and then for the past 20 years or so as a (mediocre) violist in a local community orchestra.