About

Welcome to my little corner of Substack. There’s not much here for now, but hopefully that’ll change over the next few weeks.

I’m not altogether sure what the main focus of this Substack will be. I have a lot of interests, from photography to football, music, vintage sport (especially baseball), history and most things in between.

I started this mainly to share and discuss my photographic journey and also to use it as a platform for more a more expressive medium than instagram provides

I've always been interested in photography ever since I discovered National Geographic and great photographers like Jodi Cobb and William Albert Allard.

I never liked the stories about animals or plants. I was always interested in the stories about places and the people in them, places I'd never heard of, but which made me want to go there and see them for myself.

I like simplicity and silence. We all live such busy lives with little time to just stop, look up from our screens, and not feel overwhelmed by all that goes on around us. So, I try and capture those rare moments of silence, of banality, and the ordinary, which can be beautiful in its own unique way.

I love the work of many photographers, some famous, some not so much. I much admire William Eggleston and Fred Herzog for their colour work, and for making it okay to picture the boring and the banal. Saul Leiter also fits into that category, as does the colour work of Vivian Maier, work that never fails to inspire for its simplicity and beauty. The work of Stephen Shore is another source of inspiration, as is the work of several of the artists that eventually came to form what we now call "The New Topographics" movement. The images that Steve McCurry created in India are nothing short of breath-taking, as is the work of Don McCullin.

For the rest it’s about music (I’m at that s(t)age now where all modern music is rubbish and has me looking back over the time I was probably most aware of music, namely that period somewhere between 1980 and 1996.

There’s also some sports here, mainly about my beloved Aberdeen FC, but also vintage sports, especially baseball, my other great sporting interest.

I’ll use notes as a sort of short-form Twitter-esque dump of whatever comes my way but for the most part I’ll write about music, sport, photography in short cycles, probably every other day or so. We’ll see.