These images are very roughly in chronological order, starting in the early 1960s.

If a picture paints a thousand words, then this page is 39,389 words long!

Only now, after 40 years is the significance of what I started to capture then, beginning to dawn on me. Living on one side of the city of London and working on the other, it became a habit, to walk the five miles to work through the city centre.

Interesting moments were ‘snapped’ with very little real planning of each shot. Was that good or bad? Could it be that ‘good’ shots were good just because I was relaxed and uninhibited? Have you ever seen a potentially ‘good’ image, moved to look for a better viewpoint, only to end up realising that your first intuition was the correct one? Deliberating in those days, would have lost some of the best images .

Speakers’ Corner at Marble Arch was a source of interest.

A Pentax S1, usually with a 135mm lens, was always hanging from my wrist by it’s strap, exposure constantly adjusted to the current light conditions. No built-in exposure meter in those day!

Looking back now, it was a unique opportunity that I failed to take full advantage of. So much going on! Places that no longer exist. Events never to be repeated. So much human behaviour. It would be interesting some time, to go back and atempt to repeat some of the shots.

People doing things.

People not doing things.

People communicating.

Candid photography is more ‘natural’ and usually more interesting but I do rather like the four portraits below. Taking portraits is very difficult for me, feeling very flustered and hurried about the imposition put upon the sitter. Diffused side light from a large window and minimal reflected light from within the room always gives the most pleasing results.

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These scenes along the River Thames probably don’t exist any more.

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In the 70s my wife and I moved to the country. The opportunities for indulging in photography were somewhat curtailed by the pressures of home building and I was no longer working in the photographic business.
I did become more interested in natural history photography but this subject and others will be explored in
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