I am now celebrating the fourth year in a row that I have been a finalist in the UK's Take-a-View, Landscape Photographer of the Year Competition.

If you happen to be in London between the 22nd November 2010 and 11th January 2011, you can see my latest winning picture, Flat-out Power Kiting in the Take-a-View exhibition at the National Theatre on the South Bank.

  2010  

  2009  

  2008  

  2007  

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Show people something they haven't seen.

This is my mantra for photography. I suspect I picked this line up somewhere from something I read years ago and now can't remember, but it is a useful philosophy nevertheless.

The point is, there is some value in taking another photograph of the Eiffel Tower or the Taj Mahal, but since most people have already seen a dozen similar images, you have to come up with a significantly fresh approach to be really interesting.

Sometimes this means visiting a place when it has the perfect lighting - few people get up to see the dawn, so

that's often a good time to get some great light and show a place in a way that few people have seen it. Sometimes it means getting access to somewhere that is usually closed. Sometimes it means working out which season will show a place to its best advantage.

If you explore the world of macro photography, nearly everything is novel as few people have seen the world that close.

If you can manage wildlife photography, there are many things to show people that they haven't really seen that well. Few people see any birds or animals in the countryside; fewer still carry binoculars so won't have seen an animal close up; and fewer still will have seen that animal close up and engaged in a courtship display. At the moment, I don't have the equipment or patience to cope with wildlife photography, but perhaps I will one day.

An easy approach is to go somewhere 'exotic', which is why friends are (at least somewhat) interested in your holiday pics. But I'm a firm believer that whilst India might be exotic to me, it is much less exotic to the one billion people who live there. It is too easy to forget that the familiar surroundings of your own town are very probably exotic to the rest of the world. So I'm currently engaged in finding interesting landscapes, buildings and locations within two hours travelling from my home.

A good case in point are the windpumps of Norfolk. As a general rule of thumb, windmills are usually built on hills to get more wind, but in Norfolk and a few other places in East Anglia, there are windmills built next to rivers. Their job was to pump water out of the surrounding fields into the river, so they couldn't be built on hills (and East Anglia doesn't have any hills anyway). I could be wrong, but I think there are only two places in the world where this occurs - East Anglia and the Netherlands, and the ones in East Anglia were often built by Dutch engineers in any case. Shortly after they started being built, the industrial revolution took over and now if you need to drain a low lying area of ground you would use an electric pump.

So East Anglia might not have any mountains with sweeping landscape views, but it does have its own unique landscapes. The trick is to make the most of them. Very few people have seen a windmill reflected in a river.

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A word about contacts

If you want to add me as a contact in order to follow and check out any new pictures that I upload from time to time, please go ahead. This is the normal way of things on Flickr.

However, please don't be offended if I don't add you as a contact in return. Your photostream is probably full of exceptional, lively and interesting pictures, but I already have a couple of hundred contacts and I often find it difficult to find the time to follow what they are uploading. Now I mostly only add contacts of people who are exploring places and techniques that I might find useful or people that I have met in the real world.

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Some of my photos are available on Wikipedia under a cc-by-sa license. Others, both here and on my website, are all-rights reserved but may be licensable if you contact me.