FALLING SOMEWHERE AS RAIN

With the year rapidly drawing to a close and the clocks going back an hour to prepare for the onset of winter, photographic opportunities are becoming limited, as the weather and good daylight can no longer be relied upon. So, I decided to make the best of what I had and jumped the train across the Mersey to New Brighton, on the top of the Wirral peninsula, overlooking the estuary. With a long history of smuggling and deliberate shipwrecking, the town has a rich and varied history, with secret tunnels running underground from the coast and legends of hidden treasures. New Brighton was once a popular Victorian holiday destination with fairground, pier and a large tower in the style of Blackpool. Favoured by Lancashire's industrial towns as a seaside destination, it enjoyed popularity for many years, until just after the First World War, the tower had to be dismantled and later the pier fell into disrepair. When the regular Mersey Ferry services ceased in the seventies, traffic to th...

 Speke Hall is a 16th century Tudor mansion, which was completed in 1598, by Sir William Norris, a devoutly catholic landowner, who used his wealth gained from the slave industry to create the hall. Situated on the banks of the Mersey, near to the original Speke Airport, this was an oddity which I found to be completely out of place in the industrial wastelands surrounding it. I moved into Speke in the late sixties, following the slum clearances of the inner cities, from Dingle in the Liverpool 8 area. Initially, I found the transition from the terraced streets to the brutalist estates quite jarring and missed my old home, but I was gradually swayed by the presence of the airport and the amazing hall. My first visit would have been with primary school and as an impatient 8 year old, I did not fully appreciate the significance of the place. However, I was particularly taken with the two massively ancient yew trees, situated in the central courtyard of the site and towering over the ...

One of the most exciting parts of photography, is the reveal at the end of a shoot. I am not by any means a technical photographer and rely more on luck than judgement when shooting with the iPhone or compact. Whilst in sunny Cyprus it was especially awkward to see the screen in bright locations, so sometimes I had to hope for the best. The camera does have the advantage of having a shaded viewfinder attachment on the rear, to make focussing easier, but even so it can be very easy to miss a shot while fumbling with the controls or chimping the previous shots. So I always look forward to sitting down each evening with the iPad and curating the days take, to see what I have gathered. Nine times out of ten I end up with a lot of average shots, but occasionally, I get a few keepers. I aim for the vernacular style, to either capture a particular moment or vision, or to record the events of a day. So besides tramping round dusty catacombs and shooting doors in back streets, I like to get a b...