Thank you, Gail. You also have a great eye for the things that are easily (dis)missed and for turning the perhaps ordinary into something beautiful and perhaps thoughtful, certainly thought-provoking.

Photography is one of my passions. It goes back to when I was a child. My father was a professional photographer in the late ’50s to mid ’60s. We had out own darkroom, so I was privy to the magic of the emerging print. I graduated through increasingly good cameras, from black-and-white 2¼" square format to 35 mm black-and-white (at uni) to colour negative to slides.

I won an Olympus OM-1 in the mid-’80s and, when good quality film stock became harder to find and more expensive to have processed, I went over to compact digital. I know work with a Canon 5D with ‘norma’, macro and 400 mm tele lenses.

I look for the unusual, the things we so often walk past or just don‘;’t notice. Photography for me is about framing reality, from the large to the small, the mundane and the extraordinary — much of the mundane can be made extraordinary with a fresh or unusual perspective.

Photography sits comfortably alongside writing for me, as both are ways of opening windows onto the world.