Fellow photographers - THANK YOU very much for visiting my Flickr pages! I hope we can share that passion that drives us to keep making photographs.

 

Do please feel free to leave a critique or observation too. Plus, importantly, PLEASE IF POSSIBLE VIEW THE IMAGES ON A FULL-SIZED SCREEN - IT MAKES A WORLD OF A DIFFERENCE!! In fact, I found myself guilty of hypocracy, because I regretted that most visitors to my photostream looked at the pictures on their phones, missing out on so much.... but then I realized that this is exactly what I so often do, because of constraints of time and place. So I HAVE RESOLVED TO LOOK AT MANY MORE FLICKR IMAGES ON MY PC, AND ESPECIALLY WHERE I SEE THE PHOTOGRAPHER IS TRULY AN EXPONENT OF THE ART OF PHOTOGRAPHY. So, I invite you to do the same, if you are not already doing so!!

 

I have had a life-long passion for photography alongside my other love, music. I have just stepped down after nearly 30 years of teaching, as Director of Music in high schools, most recently in Richmond, near London, UK. If you are interested, here is a concert of the iconic Carmina Burana by Carl Orff which I put on in Richmond not that long ago:

 

www.youtube.com/watch?v=xIk4MsdBR1Q&list=PLITd8x2U-R4...

 

I have returned to my old home in beautiful West Wales, and now have the opportunity to spend more time developing my photography. I have just purchased a converted camper, a 2016 Vivaro, and planning many trips with my camera, in Wales and further afield. I love having this freedom now.....

 

As well as landscapes, I have more recently explored macro and wildlife photography, so you'll see that I love being out in natural surroundings.

 

I do also love photographing musicians and other performers, and probably would enjoy street photography, but can't avoid feeling that I don't have the right to do this without permission, and that somehow makes the activity lose the point - for me at least.

 

You'll see that I don't have that much interest in chasing numbers and followers. For me Flickr is about making contact with other photographers, learning from them, sharing my own work and getting into conversations about photography. So it is a priority for me always to have time to reach out and communicate with those who take the trouble to look at my photographs, comment on them, or just tell me which ones they happen to like. If someone looks at my images I will take time to look at theirs too.

 

However, I ALWAYS welcome communication and conversation, and very happy if members post a constructive comment/critique on any of my images.

 

My main camera is a Nikon D850 (STILL, and STILL loving it!) and some of the latest versions of Tamron's zoom lenses, as well as my Nikon 16-35mm. I haven't any need or wish to update this, although I do occasionally get a new lens. My only filters are polarisers and NDs (for long exposures). These days I often combine multiple images in Photoshop, for focus-stacking, exposure blending and panoramas, and often a combination of these. My style tends to being somewhat naturalistic, although editing is a very big part of making a photograph, and something I also love working on. I'm a believer in the "art which conceals art".

 

With the developments in editing in recent times, and with the addition (for me) of Topaz software, it has been very interesting to revisit some older photographs and see how easy it is to make improvements on them, and I know many others have shared this experience.

 

Printing my best images is something I always look forward to, and using London's Printspace studio, I recently made a very large print on Hahnemuhle German Etching paper of one of my favourite images of Ceibwr Bay. Seeing it framed and displayed meant a great deal and especially when others have been affected or moved by this and other images. I also very much like framing images and giving them as gifts to friends. I so strongly recommend anyone to print their work if they are only posting their images online - it is a totally different experience.

 

I am on a journey to fulfil my ambition to make photographic collections of different areas of Wales, and my own region of West Wales in particular, over time, and put those collections together for display in exhibitions or possibly books - I think this is a great way to celebrate the wonderful landscape and country. I also think images are best displayed in a way which makes sense of a group or collection of photos (although not with some arbitrary theme, like a school project!) and this is something I want to do more of in the future.

 

Finally, if by any chance you would like to use one of my images, please reach out to me first rather than doing it without permission - thank you.