My father, rest his soul, was a draughtsman of the old school who could draw incredibly detailed, meticulously rendered, photoreal pictures of things (with real pencils on paper). When I was young he could see that I would never have the skill or the patience to follow in his footsteps and he told me that I would never be an artist. Naturally I set out to prove him wrong.

My world is so different from what his was and though he didn't understand anything digital I think he came to respect what I do and to see that he'd misjudged me. But as it turns out, I'm not much different from him - too caught up in making a living to be a real artist.

Back when the discipline was analogical, chemical and physical, I went to art school and majored in photography. After that, because I was also kind-of a writer, I spent twenty years as a creative director before going back to university for a second bite, just as the Internet was emerging.

These days I'm an academic by 'trade', researching and teaching in a field broadly called digital innovation. That's how I discovered flickr - researching for a course on social media. For a while it became my favourite procrastination!

It is probably obvious that my engagement with flickr waned for a few years. I still drop by every now and then but my creative pursuits lead me in diverse directions.