Hi! I'm Dan, and I'm a 29-year-old writer, artist and amateur archaeologist currently living in Hampshire, England.

I was introduced to photography when I was 5, but took it up avidly at the age of 12; since then, my art and I have had a fairly oscillatory relationship, sometimes up, sometimes down, fits and bursts of activity interspersed by lengthy droughts.

I've always tried to convey in every photograph a story, a vision; in my earliest years I would insist that the viewer looked - but also saw - into the shot, stopped to think.

To me, at that time, my photography was about trying to convey raw emotions, states of feeling and of being, blurring the boundaries between what we perceive and what is. It was about putting you where I was in that moment.

One theme which has stuck with me is the idea that photography is much more than creating a representation of something I see: it's the art of freezing one moment forever in a frame.

I decided to take a step away from photography in 2014, to focus on my writing and other interests which gripped my attention at that point in my life.

This was to be the latest of the long droughts I mentioned earlier - and, some four years later, I took up the camera again in the summer of 2018. I would say I'm now more invested in the artistic side of things; I'm not so worried about each shot being a good one, but more interested in creating a basic image and then experimenting around in processing to see what I can do with it - the zanier the better. Some old favourite themes won't ever go away, though - I'm still a huge fan of black-and-white, leading lines and stark contrast, as I'm sure you'll see when you flick through my photostream.

I suppose I'm now a veteran Flickr-er, having joined in May 2008. Well, my decade here has been one of immense personal growth and development, and I do enjoy looking back at my earliest uploads - if only for a moment or two. Many of my photos here have captions, some of them going into paragraphs; some are highly important to me, because they were important when I took them or uploaded them. I can only hope that for anyone out there in need of a lighthouse in the maelstrom of life, my story can be proof that if you never, ever believe you're capable of giving up, you really can weather even the harshest storm.

Thanks for reading, and for viewing.

"Fire of Mind can only find

Fit Counterpart in Fire of Heart"

"Our greatest glory lies not in never having fallen; but in rising when we fall."

- Dan (October 2013; March 2016; August 2018; October 2020).