Muddling into middle age - moans, groans and grumbles abound but still carrying around significant elements of my youth, namely rock music, quirkiness, avant-garde, offbeat etc.

I have always liked photography and fine art.

I used to like to "compose" my shots a la text book - they looked good, but intrinsically boring, tedious and hackneyed - in affect they were well done shit, merely studies in photography!. I have looked at other photos around Flickr and found that many were not so much composed but had something interesting to say about what was being photographed as well as the person taking the photograph. In exploring this site, I have been more inspired by the down in the street or in the country stuff, than those 'oh so boring' magazine type shots.

Although I like Photoshop in that you can alter the contrast, brightness and hue it can overkill the image - I guess most of us can tell when a photo has been over-Photoshopped - it can become complete bollocks. Having said that, you can have great fun manipulating images and making photo montages; but that's the extent of it.

I have learned to live with the fact that I enjoy taking photographs with crap cameras; were I to get sex machine of a camera, I could become quite pretentious and all those rather base creative elements in me would go out of the window. Impoverishment can be such an enriching experience.

Having said all that, I am getting a little bored with photography as a means to its own ends. I have taken up drawing and sketching again. I am also exploring the potential of Corel Draw graphics package, my version is around 10 years old, I guess that the latest Corel package has more bells and whistles attached to it. So I have started to snap backgrounds, steal things from billboards in close-up so that it's impossible to identify the original source; do sketches; pilfer from ancient source books where the copyright has expired. I put all this stuff together in one creative urge. Hope you enjoy and get some ideas from them.

My rule to good photography is use your eyes, head and camera - in that order.