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I am very late/new to photography. having always expressed myself creatively using musical instruments, writing and doodling.

I bought my first camera in 2004: a Canon A1 bought from a Professional photographer who was often working with Magnum photographer Martin Parr, apparently. So the camera felt special for different reasons when it arrived in the post one morning. I wasted no time in learning darkroom techniques, developing in the bath the pictures I'd taken with the A1, some studio and location work and endlessly reading and looking at the work of brilliant photographers. Though there were so many, I particularly found Henri Cartier-Bresson enthralling on many levels.

After light leaks, faulty shutter and twenty years service the Canon A1 was finished. I used a clunky 35mm Praktika, for 6 months and then, with the enthusiasm of a child returning to school after the long and fabulous summer holidays, I walked into a branch of the UK high street camera shop - Jessops.

I came out of the shop with my first and only DSLR. Canon 350-d. I'm so glad I bought a digital camera and binned both the A1 and my silly and unfounded ideas of what 'going digital' really meant. All the pictures on Flickr are taken with this camera.

I haven't worked out Photoshop yet so all the images are all as they were taken, except for the most basic cropping and contrast repair using the standard Windows facility.

I'm interested in constantly revisiting themes surrounding people and places and looking to find something new in them. For me, there is never 'closure' in this type of photography. The job is never truly 'done'.

Having bemoaned not owning a camera when I travelled abroad in the nineties, I realise now (that I shan't be travelling abroad again) that there is more than enough to be getting on with here in UK. It is a land with as many different types of people living in it as it is a landscape with as many peculiar national foibles buried beneath it and just as many different types of monuments built upon it!. I was inspired by the programme "A Sense Of Place" which trained the spotlight on indigenous folk that still abound and have rituals and customs still central to their day-to-day lives here in UK.

While I still have a bit of the Martin Parr in me that merrily points the camera at people-and-things that offers a fleeting laugh, I am becoming increasingly interested in things that explain, on a more subtle level perhaps, more about the past, my past, our past, through the people and events that are shaping the present, politically, spiritually, environmentally and sociologically etc. I think I particularly admire the technical skill and vision of photographers like Bill Brandt, Fay Godwin and Sebastiao Salgado with these things in mind.

Joseph