In the same way that authors will often carry notebooks with them to record thoughts, words or expressions which might be useful at some point in the future, and painters carry notebooks to make sketches or watercolours for future use, so I make a lot of pictures which often get reused at a later date – either as part of a composite new image or as source material or as inspiration for something else. These are my digital notes: my photographic works in progress.

Photos are never absolute truths but sometimes, if one is lucky, they can present an intersection of radically differing truths or realities that’s quite close to poetry. They can force us to see, rather than merely looking.

Some people may feel the colours or contrast to be extreme or overdone; others may feel they’re the complete opposite: to which there is no answer other than: that’s how I wanted to present the pictures. Using extremes of colour and contrast and perspective forces us to re-examine the boundaries of and values in an image, to think a little more about what it means or says. I deliberately try to force those extremes in order to discover what else the image may hold for me.

I tend, by and large, not to see any photograph I take as a mistake or a waste of time: one can almost always learn something from these images, or else use them in some way or other to create some kind of composite which goes far beyond the original.

The images in the galleries should be viewed as I’ve described them: either as works in progress or as mostly unaltered images which have the potential to be made into something that could – possibly – be good – or else as scraps from which something more can be made.

The images in “Painting with Light” should be viewed in exactly this way: as the starting points for other and more complex work.