It's strange how different a place can be when you return to it with a photographer's eye. I grew up very near the Kruger National Park in South Africa, an outstanding wildlife reserve created by Paul Kruger in the 1880s. When I was a child, my parents used to visit the park often but because I was never much into photography (or wildlife) as a kid, I wasn't too fussed about the place.

Ten years ago, as a young adult, I returned for a week, and was so bored at the prospect of driving around all day and seeing nothing particularly spectacular, that I left early - an unforgivable sin in retrospect. Now that I'm grown up and have become addicted to photography in much the same way, I suspect, as a drug addict becomes addicted to their drug of choice, I see things in an ...

Like many other contributors on this site, I have placed some of my images on other stock sites to get as much coverage as possible of the stock agency market. This inevitably means giving up Exclusivity on some sites, but that is something I'm prepared to do for the moment.

Spreading images over two or more sites gives us amateur photographers a fine opportunity to see what sells and what doesn't sell. What makes this process even more intriguing is the fact that, all too often, there are no clear answers.

You'll soon find that unless you've been lucky or skilled enough to take an exceptionally outstanding image, you are going to get some very mixed results about what sells and what doesn't. For instance, if you have 100 of your best images on three different sites, and leave them for,...

There's something really special about getting your first good bird photo. The type of photo you look at and just know is not as rubbish as the hundreds you've taken before.

For some reason, I've not gone to too much trouble to take photos of birds in England, where I live, even though there is an abundance of color here.

Twitchers in Britain can often be heard proclaiming 'Look at that magnificent crossbill' or 'What a great tit!', without any hint of irony. But despite the beauty of jewel-like blue tits, red-breasted robins, blackbirds, magpies, in my case familiarity has bred, if not contempt, then just plain indifference.

But when I'm lucky enough to go travelling, and I'm surrounded by world-famous landmarks, buildings, mountains, rivers, I'll always give a passing bird preference,...

I never realised how photogenic mosques are until I visited Cairo. In fact, I started my holiday thinking the pyramids would blow me away, while I was only fairly excited about visiting the mosques. My idea of photographing a mosque was snapping a minaret silhouetted against a deep orange sunset. As it turned out, the pyramids didn’t disappoint but the mosques far exceeded my wildest expectations.

I always lumped mosques in with churches from a photographic point-of-view – decent architectural subjects, which don’t particularly inspire from an aesthetic point of view unless there is an unusual cloud formation or a storm-darkened sky. From the moment I arrived at Ibn Tulun Mosque in Islamic Cairo, my opinion changed.

The most impressive ...

Cairo is an assault on the senses. But now that I have got the lay of the land, I'd love to go back & take many photos I missed out on first time around. The best photo opportunities from a travel point of view are, predictably enough, to be taken on the Giza plateau, where the main pyramids are located.

Happily, the day I went to Giza was a beautiful one, with clear blue skies & a fresh breeze. Having said that, a few puffy clouds would certainly have made my photos more dramatic. If I could ...