Originally from Gourock on the Scottish west coast, I am a self-taught photographer whose passion for the art began in my early teens.
During a busy career, for ten years as a ship's draughtsman, including two years working in Denmark, followed by almost 25 years designing and writing computer software for a Glasgow based company, my enthusiasm for photography only ever found expression as a leisure pursuit.
Moving to one of Scotland's areas of great natural beauty in 1993 with my wife Isabel, we settled in the village of Laide in Wester Ross with its sweeping sea and mountain views. Our home in the village of Laide, amongst the little cluster of houses you see in the foreground in the photograph below, is looking over Gruinard Bay to one of Scotland's greatest mountains, An Teallach, below which, on the far shore, are the beautiful pristine beaches at Little Gruinard.
Here I now specialise in landscape photography, also undertaking commissions for local businesses. From 1994 to 2006 I also provided a picture framing service, but sold this successful business to a local artist in order to concentrate full time on photography.
However I still mount and frame my own work, using the finest quality conservation mountboards and mouldings from Nielsen UK. My photographs are on display throughout Wester Ross in various outlets including the Scottish National Trust.
The main themes of my photography are concerned with the landscapes in which the people of Scotland's North-west Highlands live and work, and capturing the almost magical quality of Scotland's West Highland light. Many of my landscapes feature the tiny remote communities that live in this magnificent wilderness area, as in the above photograph. They are not only making a living, but successfully, in a growing local economy, and people living here know that they are fortunate to be living in one of the most extraordinarily beautiful places on planet Earth.
I have listed below two verses written by Lord Byron which sum up perfectly my feelings for the landscape of Scotland's West Highlands.
There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,
There is a rapture on the lonely shore,
There is a society where none intrudes,
By the deep sea, and music in its roar;
I love not Man the less, but Nature more,
From these interviews, in which I steal
From all I may be, or have been before,
To mingle with the universe, and feel
What I can ne'er express, yet cannot all conceal.
From Lord Byron's 'Childe Harold's Pilgrimage'