On a hazy autumn morning in Hertfordshire you can just about picture the exhaust trails from Spitfires and Messerschmitts looping about the skies - I say just about, because really what you see and feel, as a traveler from Canada, visiting friends and family, with no job to hurry to and nothing in particular to do or get done, is the peace and tranquillity of gentle hills and tidy villages, the softly diffused light of Keats’s ‘season of mists and mellow fruitfulness’ and of course the drizzle and damp.

Toronto! I have been trawling my metaphorical box of photographs, looking to retrieve images of the city I have been absent from too long. Armed with my camera, I have been stalking new prey. So, do please  take a look at my portfolio - an ongoing work-in-progress - here.

Fall in Toronto sends me foraging through the archives, a slow process of sifting through photographs made over the past five years and more, searching for images that are worth working on and, I hope, worth sharing with you.

So, for my September offering, here is a portfolio of black-and-white images of basking hippopotami, calm and at ease in the murky waters of the St Lucia Wetlands, a World Heritage site on the the north-east coast of South Africa.

Rob and I were down there on holiday…

This post introduces three new photographic portfolios, and additions to a fourth. It’s been a busy month, working through my back catalogue, editing and refining my images, make initial selections and then culling, culling, to the point where I feel I have a collection of images that is coherent, of sufficiently high quality, and hopefully of interest to others - meaning, you.

Some birders take photographs, and some photographers specialise in photographing birds. I am neither a skilled birder nor a specialised bird photographer, but over the years and across many different places and spaces I have accumulated a good many bird images, and this portfolio represents I think the best of them, or at least the most interesting - selected, as a photographer selects, with no pretence at representivity, but simply for their quality as images.

From the ubiquitous and pervasive ‘selfie’ to the great works of art, we are obsessed with our own image - the images of ourselves, of the rich and powerful, of the man or woman in the street - and just as obsessed with the notion of watching ourselves being watched, ourselves watching others.

Canada Day seems just the right day to introduce ‘Shorelines,’ a new portfolio of photographs, the photographic product of a recent visit to Vancouver and Vancouver Island.

Sumer is icumen in, loude sing cuckou!

So sang the English in the 13th century, and so might we sing now, as the warm days advance and cooler days give way. Summer in Toronto is a time of carnivals and festivals, meetups with friends, picnics and barbecues, soaking up the sunshine on downtown patios as the world streams by.