I don't believe this phone box has a working phone in it, but that hardly matters given that the occupant is a mannequin and mannequins can't talk.

There was something about this tree that meant I just had to photograph it, even though I'm not at all happy with the nature of the background.

I saw this shed and was immediately struck by its proportions - which invited flights of fancy as to what possible purpose it may serve. Perhaps a private place for turning around, if the owner suffers social anxiety with regards to the act of turning around in public?

A conspiracy of branches.

Life literally springing eternal - mossy growths on graveyard headstone. I like the colours.

Very unusual commemorative headstone for the Jeffersons who die within a fortnight of each other. There is surely some beautiful story buried here.

I don't think I like this image but I don't know if perhaps I should.

I've never seen a cross like it before, almost a cross cercelée but for the central apeture it sports.

With its modest crenellations and imposing trespass notice I really wanted to give Cliff House quite the retro style in keeping with its 1844 victorian construction. I've opted for a copper-tone effect which has required a sligtly higher contrast than I would overwise have adopted. I really wanted the chimneys to 'pop out' in their splendid bright whiteness; but they also had to be held back to ensure that the details weren't lost. It certainly looks to be a very fine and grand retirement home - I wonder if it is.

Showing the Listening Ear sat in the grounds of the farm (now animal sanctuary) in Boulby. The owners of the land have gone to trouble to fence their animals off from the ear specifically so folk can come and have a look at it. That's quite some trouble to go to - especially when you consider that some folk rock up, leap over the wall and fence without a by-your-leave and even occassionally try to thump the owners of the sanctuary when they point out that they are actually trespassing. Chris and I pulled up, enquired about seeing the ear and where best to park and were met with cordiality and accommodation from the off.

I guess city living engenders a sense of entitlement, the idea that the countryside just belongs to everyone and no-one really; but that hasn't been true since the invasion of the saxons et ál circa 600CE. And when you consider that these heritage tourists haven't even contributed to the provision of a modern water supply to this ancient farm, that entitlement seems a little thin to me.

This shot uses fairly classic composition with the horizon riding the lower-third line of the frame and with the visual weight of the building centering around the lower right cardinal point.

There's a couple of things to note about the composition of this image. Firstly, the horizon is not level. We're often told to ensure the horizon is level, but this is poor advice when the horizon is in reality rising! Here I have straightened the image based on the roof-lines of the buildings.

Secondly, having decided to place the horizon around the lower-third line of the frame I then had to decide where to place the buildings. You will note that there is uneven space to either side of the row of buildings. The initial impulse is to place the lower-right cardinal point dead centre of the brick buildings, as indicated below. This has the effect of placing the centre of the barns bang on the lower left cardinal point, in opposition to the brick buildings - this slight nuance of extra prominance for the barns has the effect of splitting the row of buildings into 2 seperate subjects; inviting us to consider the one versus the other.

But that is not what I want from the image - I want us to consider the whole string of buildings as a single subject within the landscape. To that end I have shifted the whole image to the right so that the weights of all of the buildings contribute to a single cardinal point (the lower right point) rather than being equally distributed between both lower cardinals.

Objects within the frame may coalesce into singular perceived subjects or else may dissociate into multiple perceived subjects. These subjects have a weight (defined by their size and tonal depth) and a significance (defined by their positional relationship with other subjects and the frame itself). As we move objects around within the frame, whilst chosing the POV for the shot, we experience the objects in-view as they coalesce or dissociate into subjects. It is very common in photography for an otherwise great shot to be despoiled by the lack of a single step to the left or to the right. This I think happens when we consider subject as synonymous with object - rather than seeking to construct the subject from the balance of coalescing objects.

It's a bit hard to explain, but my point is that subjects don't really exist; they are invariably abstract concepts. The photographer creates the subject by balancing one or more objects within the frame.

Whilst devising a website for a client I had come to learn about the fight for provision of mains water in the hamlet of Boulby (near Saltburn) back in the late 80's.

Wait, what? Fighting for a mains water supply in the 80's? Isn't mains water like a human right or some such in this great Great Britain of ours? Well, it would seem not, in fact parts of the hamlet still don't have mains water now, here in the 21st Century - leastways according to the very accommodating and friendly Nat who lives on the farm where the Listening Ear is located.

We spent a very pleasant 20 minutes in her company listening to the tales of running a semi-unofficial animal sanctuary ("I'm on the police register - oh no that sounds bad, I mean they bring me lost sheep and things nowadays") whilst traipsing around her land; it seems a little unequal really - that she is so happy and prepared to spend time with absolute strangers to share this strange historical monolith (which she is under no obligation to do whatsoever) and we, as a society, don't even care to provide her with a modern water supply.

Thank you very much, Nat, for the time and good company.

Mortuary for souls lost at sea in Saltburn-by-the-sea.

First, the geometry in this shot is crucial; the building must be wholly true. There can be no convergence of the verticals nor any apparent pitch nor skew. The juxtaposition of the regular human construct with the rolling organic hill demands geometric precision.

Mid-tones have been pushed high in the exposure lattitude with the shadow region somewhat expanded. This not only gives a smooth tonal gradient but also increases the seperation of the background from the sky and main subject. This composition of tones enhances the graphic nature of the image, which is wholly in keeping with the organic versus inorganic arrangement of the object composition. We pretty much generally think of image composition in the two dimensions of the viewing canvas. Here we see tonal compostion lends us that much needed third dimension.

Okay yes, I know - it isn't really number zero; clearly a digit fell off. But, I was just struck by the idea of living at number 0. I think it's a sweet idea. There should be a story behind that door. But here I am being a photographer, not a story teller, so you;ll just have to tell your own. To my mind, photographs don't so much tell a story as invite a story to be told. Kind of like the ultimate death of the author.

The first reason to visit Skinningrove that found me was it's annual bonfire - a really significant community led event that is just as famous as it needs to be, given how jam-packed it gets every November 5th. My good friends Richard and Doff have played key roles over the years; Doff with her licence to carry fireworks and Richard with is ability to build anything out of wood. You can tell how impressive the bonfire is because I have visited it over the years - and really, I'm not one for venturing out on a cold November night to watch flames and explosions. But I did, and my life is all the more complete for doing so.

So thank you, especially to Richard who we lost in 2016.

If you want to know more about Richard The Bonfire Builder (amongst many other things) do take the time to check him out in memorium at https://richardbaker.online/ - the scale of the Skinningrove Bonfires will amaze you.

The bench that you see in the image here is sited at Richard's favourite spot for reviewing the work on the bonfire. It is the most substantial bench I have sat upon and is a great place to take a picnic lunch.

The north East coastline is certainly rugged, and oft times tempestuous - but on this day Chris and I crossed the beach and climed up to the crest of the hills along the Cleveland way to look back at this beautiful blue-lagoon type scene with the sun kissing the fields..!

I'm not, by any means, a landscape photographer. If I were then I would probably have been here at dawn with the sunlight flooding the East facing cove.

I take 'landscape' photos when I find myself in a landscape, whatever time of day that may be. I guess I believe landscapes have a beauty all day long. I think it is more important to discover images around us, in front of our eyes, than to plan them.

One of 11,000 or so village halls in England - now why on earth would I know that???

Well, much of my Covid Lockdown time has been spent half employed, half volunteering, on a project to archive, document and celebrate the work of England's Rural Community Development workers. I can't say overmuch as the project is not yet public facing, but I am learning a lot about rural life in England - so unimpressive photographs of unimpressive buildings are really now quite my thing. This image speaks quite clearly of the times, with the hall being closed and deserted. But there is a fuller story to tell as village halls have played a vital role in all times of national emergency. So this image, on its own, somewhat belies a greater truth - although I feel it carries a certain poignancy.

I was delivering The Phonebook, more to see around the local area than to reitre to Mexico on the proceeds. It was a most excellent adventure but was deeply exploitative work. You might have thought Letterbox (the agency for the delivery of the directories) would have had something to say to its delivery folk on the advent of the pandemic; but no, not one peep from them.

Anyway, I was just weighing up whether or not the walk down the drive and back made this delivery worthwhile when I spotted this rusty old shed in the field next to me. I like the geometric interplay between the sweep of the land and the shape of the shed, I almost imagine the shed is playing 'peek-a-boo'.

I had pre-visualised this to be a colour image, with the red of the rusted shed and the green of the field contrasting nicely. But the hues lacked warmth and vibrancy and although I could have dialled those attributes up I was struck once I'd seen the B&W version. I always work in monochrome for a part of my processing workflow - to attain the tonal seperation I'm looking for before considering how I want to allow the colour to come through (if at all). This comes from years of B&W darkroom work and comprises a part of my visual signature.

A lot of authoratative photographic voices like to bang on about the importance of pre-visualisation. Hell, it readily fills chapter 10 or 11 of any advanced photography guidebook.

I mean it is important - but it gets presented as somekind of 6th sense, like there's a judgement in it - as if you can't see your image before you trip the shutter you're not a proper photographer.

My point is, it isn't always important to impose your own rigid ideas onto a subject, sometimes you trust the subject to tell the story you're anticipating; and you wait to see what exactly turns up.

In fact, it isn't even possible to pre-visualise an image like this one. It's a shot of an exceptionally twisted tree that has been duplicated, horizontally fliped, and merged back with the original.

I knew the introduced symmetry would close-up all kinds of lines and arcs to create a pattern of shapes. I could not predict what that pattern would be like in any detail. But now I see all kinds of shifting faces and figures amongst the branches as I look at the result. As I knew I would, because trees tell stories.

When you let them.

This is one of my all time favourite images. Perhaps not because of the image itself so much as for what it represents.

On a personal level it shows the last days of our time in The Groves, the very first property I bought (from the proceeds of working in SE Asia for a couple of years). This is where Chris and I started our life together and that box you can see was just stuffed full of dear memories.

It was around this time that I started to understand that photography is, or can be, so much more about what isn't shown than what is. Obviously this isn't always the case, but I think my most poignant or suggestive images are always about the unseen. I discuss these thoughts at greater length in my How To Take Boring Images article.

This is a relatively well known sculpture in Middlesbrough town centre. A quick search on flickr turned up around 200 photographs of it, less than 5% of which are of the inside of the sculprure like this one. Mostly what you see are fairly pedestrian 'documentary' type shots of the sculpture. But I am always wary of simply photographing somebody else's work - be that graffiti, sculpture or architecture - the photograph must bring something new to the party.

So one of my 'rules of thumb' is to look for an angle that most people (95%?) won't have seen; make use of the camera to show the unseen. Or even the unseeable.

This shot was taken inside Middlesbrough's Forbes Buildings - which is basically an early 20th century shopping mall. It's the place I bought my first saxophone and my copy of Spit The Pips' 1992 LP Kerfuffle.

The madly excessive 'wonk' in this shot transforms it from a photo of a scene, making it more a graphic image of geometric shapes; which I like. As it turns out there are six forms of wonky photo, which you can read about in my article Working With Dutch Angles.

I do like a photograph that disorientates. This was shot looking down from a balcony, it looks like it's upside down but really, since it is effectively an 'arial' shot, upside-down and right-way-up are a little arbitary. In seeking 'the unseen angle' it is quite common to take a step left or right, or to look up (which people rarely do for themselves), but it is much less common to look down; which means when you do the resulting image is often quite distinctive. It's a very powerful effect, which of course means it's something you can't do very often.

Taken around the time of the introduction of the Bedroom Tax this was instantly an important image. Its a prime example of photographing what isn't there. I might have preferred a tighter crop, but for the presence of the car. It would have been entirely unsatisfactory to arbitarilly crop through the car so I had to arrange the framing to accomodate it. It's always worth checking the edges when framing a subject - you can crop them down later if needs be, but it is easy to ruin a shot by inadvertently cropping somethin in camera. Its kind of like sweeping stairs:

take care of the corners and the middle takes care of itself.

This is a shot taken one very drunk evening in the company of my friends Neil & Jeanette (I think I had to take a nap on their settee as there was simply no way to keep up with the drinking). The window frame is like a little stage with its own story playing out - what is that guy running from? I think this is a lovely found image that attests to the importance of always actually carrying a camera if you want to be a photographer. You can't find photos if you don't have a camera!

Sometimes an image has to be made even if it is a bit chocolate boxy and makes you feel as though you've seen it a thousand times before - actually, because in life, you don't see thousands of rainbows over churches. In fact I've seen one and here it is.

I used a long lens to compress the perspective between the foreground pumpkins and the church in the background as the contextual situation of the pumpkins was important to the story.

It's on our road so surely deserved a shot...

I just like the contrast of the very white gate in the overgrown green bushes.