About

About me

Welcome to my weblog. I am a Yorkshireman living in Leeds, West Yorkshire.

This blog is about the ups and downs, and the nears and fars of my life. It is not a source of knowledge or wisdom; it is just a source of experience, opinion and occasionally some cynicism. Perhaps “occasionally” is the wrong word, though.

Outside of 9-5, I fill my time with photography, personal website coding, and composing some very bad music. For more than a decade, my photography was a collaborative effort between me and my best friend, my beloved dog Maisie, and almost all the photographs I took between 2010 and 2022 were while out walking with her. She was the driving force and motivation that I needed to get out at all, and it was rare that she was not beside me. Maisie passed away on 29th March 2022. This website and all its content is dedicated to her memory.

Photo by Sheryl

About my photography

Photograph by Lawrence Ellwood

I acquired my first film SLR camera, a Zenit-E, in 1981 at the age of 15 and have been an amateur enthusiast ever since. 

My favourite has always been the Nikon camera. I bought two Nikon SLRs over the years – the first being the Nikon F301 in the the mid 80s and the second being the Nikon F4s, which I fell in love with in the 80s but couldn’t afford until around 2001. In 2008 I finally migrated from film to digital and since then have enjoyed a much more affordable and instantly gratifying hobby.

About this site

I began blogging in 1996, back when I was thirty and the words “blog”, or even “web log”, had yet to be born. My older blogs have all fallen by the wayside, as such things often do, domains expired and content long lost. Such was the nature of the internet at one time; nothing in the ether was permanent.

This is the latest iteration of my blog and the first to use a content management system not coded by me from the ground up. Today, my website is mainly about my photographic journey and it features content and images created by me (except where indicated). Its form is something of a hat-tip to the design of older blog formats. Not the grey page background of the 90s, though. I couldn’t go that far.

I have developed the site to be “responsive”, so that it functions on desktops, tablets and mobile devices. However, while it is accessible on all platforms, I have focused unapologetically on designing for the desktop/larger tablet environment because these platforms’ resolutions are the ones at which I feel my photographic work is best viewed.