Hello. I’m glad you found this.
This blog has been running since 2019. It has no algorithm behind it, no agency writing it, and no agenda beyond the one it started with: to pay attention to the world and write it down.
I’m Ian — a photographer, horn player, and writer living in the Vendée, near Nantes, in western France, though my heart has never entirely left the north of England. I’ve been making photographs for forty years. I started writing about them six years ago and found, somewhere along the way, that the writing had become as important as the images.
There are a lot of posts here. If you’re new, it can feel like arriving at a party that’s been going for a while. So here are three ways in, depending on what you’re looking for.
If you want the story
This blog is, underneath everything else, a long memoir in instalments — about place, time, family, and what a camera can hold that words sometimes can’t. If that’s what brought you here, start with these:
- Off to See Mum and Dad in Alnmouth (2019) — where it all really begins
- And How Did You Spend Your Summer? (2022) — on home, distance, and the German word for belonging
- Letter to My Daughter (2019) — the most personal thing on the blog
- Northumbrian Summer Part I (2025) — where the writing found its full voice
If you want the photography
Forty years behind the lens. Film, mostly. Black and white, mostly. The X100F for travel, the Nikon FE for everything that deserves the slower pace of film. Here’s a good place to start:
- Hepple for Photos, Not Gin (2022) — landscape, film, and a river that feels like home
- Sea Mist (2022) — coastal Northumberland disappearing into fog
- The UK Chronicles: A Black and White Footnote (2024) — on the process of seeing in monochrome
- Part 2: The Work — Rehearsing a Double Violin Concerto on HP5+ 1600 (2026) — the most recent work, from inside the orchestra
If you want the philosophy
Not tutorials. Not gear guides. Something closer to: why does any of this matter, and what are we actually doing when we press the shutter?
- Riding the Waves (2020) — on depression, photography, and staying afloat
- The Approaches to Photography (2023) — on being a fisherman, not a hunter
- A Photography Philosophy — Part I — the full series, for those who want to go deeper
Free guide: Photography from the Heart
If you’re here because you love film photography — or want to — I’ve put together a free guide. Forty years of learning, distilled into something I wish I’d had at the start. Enter your email below and I’ll send it straight to you.
A photograph without its story is only half the picture. That’s what this blog has always been about.
If you’ve read this far, you’re probably the right kind of reader.
Stay as long as you like.
— Ian