Journal

  • Autism – Sensory issues: Noise

    I’m very noise sensitive. If the neighbours have music on and there’s a beat coming through the wall it gets to me. It got so bad once that I jumped in my car and drove to West Kirby marine lake because I just needed to get out. I couldn’t go home. I couldn’t do anything. I just needed out. I can’t really explain the feeling other than growing anxiety, stress, panic and tension in my stomach. If I’m at home and the neighbours put music on I have to put mine on louder, which isn’t really very polite. The other option is to leave but I work from home so sometimes I can’t. That feeling though. That constant barrage of inescapable sound that makes me want to walk in front of a bus just to find peace. It’s terror.

    I also have issues in loud environments processing sound. Chatting with people in a bar is impossible. I just can’t process what you’ve said. I can probably hear it but it’s noise. I can’t really seperate it from the 200 conversations going on against a beat from an overly loud DJ. We may as well stand there and setup a WhatsApp group. That’d be way easier. Now I’ve got the ASD (Autism Spectrum Disorder) diagnosis and I’m less worried about what people think of me if I bail out of these situations. I’ll be polite but at the same time I need to look after my mental health. Christmas Party season is coming up soon. Another reason why it’s great to work from home. No social pressures. Annoyingly I go to a lot of exhibition launches and sometimes thats the only time to chat to other photographers. It’s very hard work but it can be rewarding. If only everyone looked at the work in silence and then went to a quiet cafe to talk after or better yet all talk on Slack or WhatsApp in silence while walking around the exhibition. Not everyone attending is a confident social being and you could argue that face to face events aren’t 100% inclusive. Maybe every gallery needs a publicly accessible text-based communication channel to allow for discussion on the latest exhibition. Slack for Galleries? All that said I really did enjoy having a coffee and a chat with a mate from San Francisco the other week in a nice quiet cafe. A decent face to face conversation in a quiet environment is a fantastic thing for me. Incredibly rewarding.

    Right after I was diagnosed as being on the autistic spectrum I went to John Lewis and bought noise cancelling headphones. They are expensive but knowing I’m disabled I decided they were a medical necessity. I was right. I can now be pretty much anywhere and find peace with those headphones. At home I don’t have to put my music on loud to block out the neighbours. I can enjoy a quiet orchestral score on a safe volume and be calm. I can sit in a loud bar and do the same. They are life changing. They freed me from feeling like I wanted to stab things into my arms just to distract myself from the noise or walking out into traffic. I don’t use those words casually because being trapped by noise really really terrorises me. I’m lucky I can afford these expensive Sony WH-1000MX2 headphones. Not everyone can. The technology is getting cheaper though. Maybe one day it’ll be standard on all headphones. But for now if you’re austitic and face this same terror then try and find a way to get some noise cancelling headphones.


  • An autistic photographer

    I was diagnosed as autistic in the summer of 2018. I’m 41 as I write this and maybe half way through my life so I use the diagnosis to analyse where I’ve been and where I’m going.

    Where have I been? I’ve been to computer world for a large portition of my life. I was given a C64 at the age of 6 and took to it like a Klingon to honour. I soaked up knowledge and coded till my late 20s. I loved it. I loved finding things online and making new programs. I loved that the internet provided me with an amazing space to play. I have a degree in Software Engineering, only a 2.1 so I’m no programming genius but still a degree non the less.

    I look back on those days with my diagnosis and I can see autism at work. Primary school teachers would say “gifted” with computers. They would also say “shy” and “kept to himself”. When I got access to the internet I was running up phone bills and reading everything I could. So much cool stuff to explore. I guess you could call this “hyperfocus” which is often spoke about in the autistic community. The ability to block the world out and focus on a single task. That’s a great skill for a programmer to have.

    I guess you could also say that computers were my special interest. Another autistic trait. Finding 2 or 3 things to be intensily interested in. People would say obssessed. Star Trek was also a special interest. Oh those technical guides to the Enterprise D. Yeah! But it was so handy mixing hyperfocusing and special interests together at the start of my career. It felt like I was totally on point. I was a conduit. Soaking up information, processing and applying it. I was a machine, learning.

    Today I’m a photographer. Why? Well turns out I hated being in an office. I couldn’t stand being in a small room with lots of other people all being hugely irritating. No offence as I know it’s not their fault in any way. It was autism and sensory processing. I could feel every footstep in the office through my desk as the floor was quite wobbly. Even if I tried to block out the noise in the office I could still feel it through the desk as I worked. Then there was the daily challenge of small talk. None of the web design jobs I had were in a pure design compnay of like minded people. They were always odd spaces so I never really had people to talk to. At least people I could really talk to. It was hard work and I had no real idea why. Now I do.

    Looking back through the autistic time lens I can also see that photography quickly became a special interest of mine. Yay autism. It was something technical I could read up on and really get stuck into. In 2 or 3 years I went from not understanding ISO, Aperture and Shutter Speeds to having one of the top guides on the internet on HDR and a decent audience on my, this, blog. 3 million hits a month back then. That’s probably down to autism and mixing speciali interests with hyperfocusing. I was really good at what I did back then. Annoyingly what I was doing was marmite photography called HDR (High Dynamic Range) and I guess I learned all the technical parts of photography so quick I missed the artistic side of it.

    I really can see how autism has benefited me over those years. I often think maybe I should have stayed a programmer? Put me down in front of a screen and set me a task. Off I go. I have to remind myself that I’ve been a professional photographer now longer than a professional web designer. This really is who I am now and this path I’ve walked has led me here. I’m happy here. I think this is the better version of me. The doubt is there because I’ve soaked up the technicalities of photography and what I’m interested in now is the story telling aspect. I’m yet to understand how my autism helps now. I can’t hyperfocus or specaial interest in on people or architecture. It feels more like it hinders because to do the work I oddly enjoy I have to interact with people. I have to be out in the world. The noisy, loud, blinding, bright, confusing, messy complicated world. I have to be good with people. A “people person” if you will. Remember why I left my office job days behind? Yeah. People are the worst.

    They’re not though. They’re amazing. There’s no greater feeling for me than to produce a good portrait of someone because it’s evidence that we connected, even for a moment, we connected and made this photograph. I may not be able to see how autism helps me at the moment but I can see how it hinders me. I have to worry about doing small talk while thinking about lighting a scene, ignoring all the sounds and lights around me, not worrying about how I’m being perceived by the subject and trying to make eye contact so I appear “normal”. You can’t practice this either. I can practice a landscape by going to a mountain on my own and photographing it over and over. But portraits? Nope. I have get right into the fear and anxiety and push through. Thats why doing portrait photography is incredibly important to me. Every portrait is an internal fight and every portrait is a reward.

    About the same time as I received my autism diagnosis I received an email from the British Journal of Photography saying my portrait of Valerie, a woman from Port Sunlight, was to be shortlisted in their “Portrait of Britain” competition. I was in the top 200 from around 13,000 entries. The photograph was printed in a book next to Michelle Sank whose work I saw at the Open Eye Gallery back in 2007 and left an impression with me. It was an amazingly timed bit of news. I’m disabled. I’m autistic. I can’t do this. Should I be doing this? “Here’s an award for doing this. Keep going.”

    So while I can’t see how autism is helping me today I can see how it’s got me here. If I can figure out how to better utilise it for the future maybe things will be ok.


  • Think Different

    Imagine spending your entire life, nearly 40 years of it, feeling like you don’t fit in and that you’re not exactly “normal”. You spend your life looking at the world believing it to be right and you to be wrong. But what if you find a reason for that feeling? What if you’re not wrong but just different?

    That was the experience I had in 2018 a few months before my 40th birthday. I had spent 18 months waiting to meet with an autism specialist to discuss whether I was autistic or not. After a long discussion about myself from both my persepective and that of my wife’s they said I have ASD, Autism Spectrum Disorder.

    I felt so happy. Odd to go to a medical place for a diagnosis of something and come away happy with a positive result. But I did because this explained everything I ever felt. Why the world was too bright, too noisy, too chaotic and generally not my kind of place most days. My mind was rushing with memories that I could now re-evaluate from this new perspective. I understood why things had happened the way they did now. Oh if only I could leap back in time and re-do things with this knowledge. It was a proper life changing experience.

    In the 18 months or so since being formally diagnosed I’ve really embraced it. For decades I’ve felt uncomfortable feeling different to everyone else. Imagine how life changing it is to have a medical professional tell you that it’s all ok. It’s ok to be different and I’ve done well in my life to get where I am.

    It’s not just a feeling anymore. It’s an actual prooveable difference. My brain isn’t like 99% of people’s brains. I am actually different to most people, medically speaking. On the back of my car there’s a sticker that says “Driven by something different.” A bit of marketing nonsense for sure but I liked that idea when I bought the car. That was 18 months before I was diagnosed so you can see how these little things affected me. Apple’s “Think Different” ad campaign always struck a cord with me too. It is hard to state just how big a difference this has made to my life knowing that there’s a real reason why all those little “Think Different” moments got to me.

    I no longer care if I’m odd, strange, weird or anything like that. Being Autistic is what makes me me and I embrace that 100%. I do not fear it. I understand it makes life really tough some days but here I am at 41 and I’m finally happy with who I am.

    Think Different.


  • A photographer sleeps with his camera

    Jimmy Olsen : Chief, I didn’t have my camera with me.

    Perry White : A photographer *eats* with his camera. A photographer *sleeps* with his camera.

    Superman III

    I always have a camera on me. A real proper camera with dials and switches. I always have my iPhone and while it can do many amazing things if I want to take, make, a photograph then I’ll get out my camera. Ever since I became a photographer I’ve carried a camera. Canon 10D, 30D, Nikon D700, Fuji X100s and now a Leica Q or sometimes the Leica M240. I feel like I’ve been on a journey to find a camera that is both modern but also connects me to an old Zorki I used to play with as a kid. There’s history, nostalgia and story there. More than that there’s simply the joy in using a real camera like a Leica. I often find my thumb trying to wind the film on because it feels just like a film camera. It feels like a camera should in my memories. I love using these cameras.

    That might be as far as the excitement goes though. After a day walking the streets I come home and edit the images. I spend way to long sat at my computer trying to work out what is “right”. I should just shoot JPG and let the camera manufacturer dictate what is right but I’m aware that I can get more out of a RAW file than a JPG so I chip away at the image till it’s crying in pain, and then chip away till it’s dead. Eventually a good photograph makes it way out of the pain and presents itself to me. I’m happy.

    But then what? I’ve walked 15 kilometers and spent hours if not days editing the images for what? I’m not a staff photographer at the local paper. I have no “Chief” to show them to for the weekend suppliment. It’s just me and my camera. Why did I just walk 15 kilometers and spend a day taking photographs? Maybe just for mental health reasons? Maybe to be out the house? Maybe to get away from working for clients and to refresh my brain? Maybe, but I’m still left with the photos that sit on my hard drive and if they’re lucky get to go on Instagram for a day trip.

    It’s been a thought in my head for a while. “What the hell am I doing?” I’m going off and producing little photo essays and I have no where to put them. I don’t know if I’m really a big project photographer looking for gallery space and trying to say something with my work. So often at talks you’ll get asked “What’s your work about?” and other than saying “Well its an exploration of what I can do with a camera” I geniuenly don’t have a clue. So I keep exploring and producing little photo essays just because I like to.

    Maybe when I retire, lol, Machine Learning will be so smart that I can just ask my phone to produce a book of my work based on a theme and send it off to a publisher. “Hey Siri. Show me cloud photographs.” “Alexa, sell this photo book.” Maybe all I’m doing is saving for the future? My camera is a little time machine after all.

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  • The journey to Snowdon

    I’ve been visiting North Wales all my life. As a family we would take our caravan to Anglesey as often as possible. Unfortunately I have no real memories of these trips outside the smell of coffee and the sound of my parents talking as I’d fall asleep. I don’t remember the beaches, the views, the Kodak (Instagram for you kids) moments, the castles or the mines. There’s the photos but not the memories.

    Me at Penrhyn Castle, 1986.

    One thing I do remember is my parents telling me they climbed Mount Snowdon and one day we would get the train to the top and sit in the cafe. I have a vauge memory of us trying but the train had closed by the time we got there. As I got older and my parents’ health deteriorated we stopped going on our camping trips. As a family we never made it up to the top but I always remember my parents story of climbing Snowdon when they were 30. One day, maybe, I’d climb it. I’m 40 now. I felt like I had missed my chance.

    My dad in his 30s possibly at the top of Snowdon

    It’s 2015 and my wife and I are in Iceland. We spend a great day driving along the world’s least most dangerous road. There’s a list of 500 of the most dangerous roads in the world and this was number 500. It was great fun. Amazing views of mountains, glaciers and so quiet you could hear the ice cracking. We stayed out late so our trip back to Rekyavik would be in the dark just in case we got a chance to see the Northern Lights. We did and it was magical (or strictly speaking cosmical because science isn’t magic).

    Aurora over Iceland

    But for some reason driving in pitch black conditions not knowing where the edge of a cliff might be was harrowing. I was trying not to throw up while taking photos of the aurora. I couldn’t explain it. It was like someone showing you a spider for the first time and instantly being afraid. How can you be so afraid of something you only just discovered? Maybe I’ve become too acustom to city lights? Whatever the reasoning it limited the photographs and the places I could go. How would I ever be able to do more astrophotography? (Turns out it was dead easy to do from an Airbnb balcony in Croatia while sipping a whisky, but don’t tell 2015 me that.)

    Last year my wife’s knitting group rented a holiday place in Wales. We did a long walk in torrential rain. I had the wrong camera. The wrong hoodie. The wrong frame of mind. Once I was completely soaked I no longer worried about getting wet and I had also become detached from the group so I didn’t have to worry about small talk. I loved it. I was having my own personal Levison Wood adventure.

    I wanted to do more. Just not at night. Scary scary night. So this summer the same group suggested we climb Snowdon. Boom! Yes! I finally get to do what my parents did. “Lets do a equinox night climb.” Wait, what? I’d never climbed a mountain let alone one at night.

    I wanted to do this though. I wanted to be the sort of person who does something most people would say “Why?” I’d rather live than regret. I love that I’m now the sort of person that I used to look at and think they were mad. If its raining out I’ll go do a 10km run. I won’t see anyone else and a good view doesn’t have to be a sunny blue sky. Sure I could stay in and play a video game but that’s not really living for me now. Steve Jobs always believed that technology alone was not enough. His world was better when technology and art combined. I used to be a programmer but now I’m a photographer. I’ve always pushed myself to find things to photograph because the camera technology is not enough. I have to take that camera somewhere interesting and by proxy I get to see interesting things. I’m a better person for being out in the world with my camera.

    So anyway, I agreed to do this bonkers activity. Climb Mount Snowdon at 1am.

    Part 2 will look at the journey up the mountain. Stay tuned.


  • Pride in Blogging

    I’ve been struggling with this blog for a number of years. I think once I started really looking into photography and realised that it was more than over-processed sunsets I struggled to find purpose and content for the site. Was I building a blog about Liverpool? About architecture? About street photography? A tech review site? I couldn’t decide and indecision held me back. Last year I had a portfolio review and the woman doing the review simply told me to keep doing what I enjoy. Don’t be something I’m not. It’s taken a while for that to really really sink in and I feel like it’s starting to have an effect. That’s why I’m trying to take pride in this site again.

    For the most part it feels like the world has moved on from blogging to podcasts and YouTube. That’s where the ad revenue has gone so it is easier content to monetise but they’re also intimate mediums. A podcast strips away all the noise leaving only a voice through which passion is heard. It’s a medium I really enjoy but doesn’t work all that well for a single person. But blogging does. So I blog.

    Social media has been around long enough now that people are having the 7 year itch. The excitement has gone out of the relationship and privacy concerns are becoming more and more of an issue. I’ve never felt at home on Facebook but I have on Twitter. Recently though I’ve found myself crafting a toot only to copy the thought into my “To blog” folder in Ulysses. Sometimes 140 (280) characters is enough to spark an idea and sometimes that idea shouldn’t be dropped into the stream that is Twitter. Sometimes it should be expanded upon and kept in a place that I’ve built. Somewhere that can easily be searched, tagged, archived and basically somewhere that I control. That’s here.

    I’m taking pride again in this site. I’m taking pride in the photography and the words and I plan to add to that with audio and video. Who am I that my voice should be heard? No-one really but photography has taught me that what we photographers do is go “Huh” at things others might not. This site is a place for me to put those things.


  • My New York Journal

    Before going to New York I had this idea to start a journal. On our previous trips my wife had done one of these and I quite liked it. I’ve never done one before for the simple reason that my wrist hurts if I write for any real period of time. The idea of writing notes of my day has never really appealed. But when I looked into the journal scene I found that it was more important to be creative than to write an essay. People create all sorts of interesting entries in their journals using stickers, drawings, stamps, scraps of stuff from the day and even use little printers to add photos. The important thing, it seems, is to spend time making something for those times in the future when you want to look back.

    So I did some research into notebooks and journals. My everyday notebook is a Field Notes but they’re not good if you start adding things into the notebook. I needed something flexible that could grow as I added memorabilia to it. What I found was this beautiful Japanese product called the Midori Traveler’s Notebook. It’s not really a notebook but more of a system. Expensive, yes, but it’s not a one time use product. It changes and grows as you need it to.

    It’s beautiful. The leather has aged wonderfully over the past year and that outer cover is what stays with you on all your travels. Inside you simply replace the journal with a fresh one for the new trip. I love that idea so much because I love to infuse objects with story and history. I would sit at the posh desk in our hotel room with a view of Manhattan and Central Park and doodle.

    On the outside I’ve added a Leuchtturm1917 pen loop to hold my pen. I used a Lamy Safari fountain pen which doesn’t bleed much through the paper. It’s a good cheap fountain pen that is very nice to use.

    So inside I have a little zipped secure area so things I collect don’t fall out. There’s also another card area for holding things like important documents and such. I stored tickets and flight information there. I have a few cat shaped paper clips to hold other things together and some NYC Washi MT tape. The great thing about the tape is it’s non-destructive so I can move things if I make a mistake. I’m a total journal convert.

    It’s all about the joy of spending time making an entry. I can’t write much so I use a stencil to do the dates. I draw the weather. I add Polaroids. I make bullet points. All that I can manage. A year later it’s one of my favourite things from our trip. It’s imprecise and totally unperfected. I’d spend weeks making the perfect Instagram print on demand book and it would be too clinical. This journal thing. I love it. I need to buy a little Fuji Instax camera or printer for our next trip.

    Things I use


  • Where am I today?

    A few weeks ago I created a morning routine. Get up. 5km run. Breakfast. Write blog. Shower. Sit down at desk and start the day. It was going well for a while until I got ill. I do plan to get back into it because what I’ve noticed over the past few weeks is that my productivity has gone down. I’m blogging simple images rather than decent crafted content because I’m getting to 11pm and remembering that I need to post something. I pondered whether running would make me a better photographer and I feel like it will/did. So I need to get back to that. (more…)

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  • I miss the ferry

    It’s been 2 months since I moved my studio from a space in Liverpool to a space in my house and because of that I rarely get the ferry any more. I think I need to do Ferry Friday or something. Have one day a week when I work from a cafe in Liverpool because I do miss the walk to the ferry and the ride over. It’s not such an issue this time of year because with the clocks changing we lose the amazing sunrise / sunsets and the ferry gets busier. Those winter months though. They’re the absolute best.