With a touch of the man-flu I really wasn't feeling it today but with the coincidence of the sun shining in an otherwise wet and miserable November aligning with my day off I decided to force myself to go into Manchester to take some images of the graffiti in the Castlefield canal basin, something I've been meaning to do for a while. The sharp and low autumn light was perfect and as I dragged myself around with the odd cough and splutter and a few bones aching it was doing wo

Way back in the early 1980s I bought my first ever film camera, an Olympus Trip 35(mm) faux-rangefinder, purchased over the course of a year on what British people of a certain age like me still somewhat affectionally call "on the HP". Have a browse on ebay or the many film camera websites these days and you can pick a restored custom model up for around the £130 mark, often with green or orange leatherette, which to be honest I would have probably quite liked back in the d

Many years ago my beloved and late ol' Dad used to tell me stories about a place called Sanctuary Wood from a WW1 battlefield in Ypres, Belgium. He would often talk about war history from books he had read and the place inspired him because it was given the name by British soldiers, who found it to be a sanctuary from the front line only for it to turn into the opposite once the horrors of war started to visit it and pretty much flatten the whole place with not a tree left s