Photography is everything to me!

"After my wife and family, photography is everything to me. It powers my life.

Being interested in both nature and humanities, my photography is as extensive as anything a camera can picture. My great love for the outdoors and our diverse landscapes, regularly compels me to go out ‘hunting’ to capture New Zealand's bountiful sights - anything really, from insignificant small scale studies to super-wide panoramic vistas of our famous icons.

The landscape is merely a stage for me to watch and study. I believe things of great beauty and interest will eventually appear and unfold into enlightening dramas. I search for redeeming features, storytelling clues and precise fleeting moments of revelation. Movement and balance are also very important as are the garlands of ever changing plays of light, weather, atmospherics and other phenomena.

Some very unexpected and amazing shows have rewarded my patience and endurance, some good, some sad, some beyond our everyday world, some beyond incredible.

I simply gather all this uniqueness and amass it as computer data.

The real art is working on my vast collection of raw material, critically selecting for the merits I had foreseen, even freshly discovering some. 

Drawing from a vast range of artistic and computer techniques I experiment, enhance, style, and critique, revisiting until my work resolves into my most satisfying ultimate expression of wonder and awe for our world, everything on it and beyond it - something others can share and deeply appreciate.

I do see myself as a witness for my camera, preferring to be a ‘photorealist photographer’ to truly reflect the world but as I see and know it! My excitement and emotional side, however, can shunt any reality into total oblivion, easily!

Photography has been my passion since youth, inviting me everywhere, taking me along many paths including authoring, exhibiting, lecturing, tutoring, judging and guest speaking.

Today, half a century later, my love for photography has only grown, extending to the arts and science; printing and publishing. I now work with it semi-professionally and alongside my communications business 'Cloake Creative' based in Timaru, New Zealand."

It is everything!