What makes me reach for the camera

It isn't usually the big view. It's the small things — an object sitting where it shouldn't, a particular stare, a piece of typography, the peeling layers of an old sign, or the way light falls across a building. I'm drawn to patina, rather than things that look newly finished.

I like images within images too — a reflection in a window, a picture hanging on a wall, a poster half-covered by another poster. One frame containing another.

Sometimes it's something completely useless. That's often the appeal.

I don't travel looking for photographs in any organised way. I walk, look around, get distracted, carry on, then occasionally turn around and go back. There are places I've photographed because of one tiny detail that maybe nobody else seemed to notice.

Sometimes I take a photograph before I've worked out what caught my attention. It can be hours or even days later before I realise what it was that made me reach for the camera.

Not because I've found something extraordinary.

Because, for a moment, for me, something ordinary has stopped being ordinary.