This year marks my tenth anniversary of working as a freelance photographer. So I thought it was timely to take a look back at the images I created after my career as a staff photographer came to an end.
On 7 November 2014 I walked out of the door of the Keighley News for the final time, having been made redundant, 31 years and 10 months after I was taken on as a trainee photographer in February 1983.
My years as a staff press photographer were interesting, if not particularly well paid, and as the public face of the newspaper you feel part of the fabric of the place, and I came to know so many people in my home town.
Setting out on my own meant a more precarious working life, but the contacts I’d made over the decades helped me establish a freelance business, and I’ve been happier working for myself over the past 10 years than at any time in my working life.
So I thought I should mark this anniversary with a look back at some of the images I’ve taken since taking the self-employed path.
2014
One of my first freelance commissions was to cover a brass band concert organised by Keighley Town Council. In the audience was the late Ian Dewhirst, a local historian and librarian whose work is still a point of reference for those seeking information about Keighley’s past.
Then it was up to the Lake District to photograph the three national park felltop assessors. These experienced mountaineers make the ascent of Helvellyn, England’s third-highest mountain, each day during winter to provide reports on weather and terrain conditions for hillwalkers. I then took the opportunity to traverse Striding Edge and head up to the summit myself on a crisp December day.
2015
In February, Tory minister Matt Hancock visited Keighley Campus of Leeds City College to view the Star Centre. Here he is in a true blue environment with college leaders in the airlock of the centre’s dummy spacecraft.
Not being tied to a staff diary gave me a bit more freedom to enjoy some travel, and I regularly visit my former Keighley News colleague Sharon Wright and her family in London. On one trip we headed to the coast. Here are the ruins of Brighton’s West Pier, destroyed by fire in 2003.
Airedale Hospital’s communications team regularly commission me to cover events at the Steeton site. Conservative health secretary Jeremy Hunt paid a visit in May that year.
It was a period when press trips were regularly offered. One such jolly was a few days in Asturias, northern Spain, at the invitation of the regional and national tourism organisations. Most of the time was spent in the mountains. Here’s a hike in some spectacular Picos de Europa landscapes.
My elder son Tom is a teacher in Manchester, but when he’s not imparting maths knowledge to teenagers or dealing with the bureaucracy of assistant headship, he plays bass and guitar in bands. This is him, right, on stage with fellow ex-Keighlian Stu Burns as Gold Jacks play at the Deaf Institute in the city.
In October I boarded the Eurostar to head to Lille in northern France to cover the innovation awards ceremony of outdoors retailer Decathlon for my online magazine grough. Each division of the company competes for the prize of best innovation and performs a presentation at the city’s Zenith arena in front of an invited audience of colleagues, customers and press.
Later that month, I was fortunate to be invited on another press trip, this time by Gore-Tex, who were unveiling a new product in the South Tyrol province of Italy. Among the activities was a walk up in the snow to a mountain hut, affording great views of the Dolomites, piercing the valley cloud.
Closer to home, Boxing Day 2015 saw floods affect many local areas after torrential rain. This partially submerged car in Haworth was being investigated by firefighters.
2016
Here’s a little insight into music production. During Gold Jacks’ recording session at Parr Street Studios in Liverpool, sadly now no more, Tom Smith and Stu Burns work out some chords that will eventually be used on the Hammond organ, while guitarist Liam Dunning’s licks come under scrutiny from the producer and his engineer, and just visible in the background, drummer James Gaskell gets a little rest.
The Three Peaks Race takes place each year, with runners tackling the near-24-mile course over Pen-y-ghent, Whernside and Ingleborough. This year the summits had a covering of snow, forcing extra concentration from Victoria Wilkinson of Bingley Harriers as she made her descent of the final hill.
The BBC’s production company created a replica of Brontë Parsonage on Haworth’s Penistone Hill for Sally Wainwright’s To Walk Invisible.
BBC Look North presenter Harry Gration was the regular compere at the Keighley Business Awards before his death in 2022. Here he is speaking before helping present awards to winners.
In August I made a return to Warwickshire to relive a small part of my student life. I’d occasionally cycle from my flat in Kenilworth to Stratford upon Avon to squint at the numerous tourists. My swansong was in June 1977 when I left university to return to Keighley. To celebrate, here are some of the said fowl on the River Avon.
The same month saw me heading north to the shores of Loch Lomond as part of a press trip organised by outdoors brand Vango. Despite camping in its shadow, I never did get the chance to walk up Ben Lomond, the most southerly munro, seen here in the gloaming with a fiery sunset.
My wife and I are fairly frequent visitors to the Lowry theatre in Salford, not to watch a deep and meaningful drama, but to have an evening chuckling at a stand-up comedian. It’s also a chance to photograph the surroundings at Salford Quays, a regenerated area of a former industrial docklands on the Manchester Ship Canal.
It’s also home to the BBC and ITV. Here, four rowers pass Media City, with the Blue Peter studio just visible on the extreme left.
In October, a family trip to the fantastic Czech capital Prague provided plenty of photogenic opportunities. One of the most interesting was in U Zlatého tygra, the Golden Tiger beerhall, throng with drinkers and serving ‘just beer’. It was packed with people but the locals made space for us to enjoy this favourite haunt of writer Bohumil Hrabal, whose bust adorns the wall, alongside a photograph of US president Bill Clinton enjoying a beer with Czech head of state Václav Havel, the country’s first democratically elected president after it emerged from Communist control.
2017
The following year, there was a big change to Keighley town centre, as the college buildings that had stood at the junction of North Street and Cavendish Street for decades were demolished.
The 1960s addition to the former Keighley Technical College whose 1950s building, seen on the right of the picture, remained standing for some time afterwards, stood on the site of the Mechanics Institute, demolished after it was gutted by a fire in March 1962. As a five-year-old, I was able to view the smouldering ruins of the Mechanics from the ambulance taking me to Morton Banks isolation hospital for three weeks when I contracted scarlet fever. The ambulance crew slowed down to enable me to peer out of the vehicle’s windows as we passed.
The building was adjacent to the older School of Science and Art and Keighley Boys’ Grammar School, the latter of which relocated to Oakbank.
In March I was invited by our local mountain rescue volunteers, Calder Valley Search and Rescue Team, to take pictures at their training session. The day began at St Ives, Harden, but was interrupted by a real callout to an injured walker in woodland at Hebden Bridge, after which training resumed, with this exercise testing team members’ skills in bringing a casualty in a stretcher up steep, wooded ground.
Later that month, we were in Amsterdam for a few days, enjoying some Dutch hospitality. The city is another photogenic location, with its architecture and nightlife reflected in the numerous canals that run through the middle of its streets, where bicycles are the preferred form of transport.
In April I headed down to Plas-y-Brenin at Capel Curig in north Wales for the annual meeting of the British Mountaineering Council, of which I was a member.
This was a crisis meeting for the council, whose leaders were facing a vote of no confidence from a group of members unhappy with the way the BMC, which represents climbers, mountaineers, hillwalkers and ski mountaineers in England and Wales, was being governed.
In the end, the vote of no confidence failed, but in a shock move, the president Rehan Siddiqui, seen here on the left with chief executive Dave Turnbull, resigned.
I was now being regularly commissioned by Keighley Business Improvement District to provide the photography for business profiles of various firms and outlets in the town centre. One of these was the Royal Oak pub on Damside where Paddy and Lisa, the landlord and landlady, had a friendly dog, Gypsy, with her eye fixed firmly on a pint of Timothy Taylor’s ale.
In April, top-notch cyclists returned to our area as the Tour de Yorkshire made its way up the district’s hills.
Here, spectators encourage competitors as they tackle the setts on a steep Haworth Main Street. The area, which has long had a cycling tradition, staged the Grand Départ of the Tour de France in 2014 and since then has hosted several major cycling races.
Still on a cycling theme, my son Tom and some of his ex-Oakbank schoolmates were in training for a mammoth relay from John O’Groats to Land’s End to raise cash for Dementia Friendly Keighley and the Alzheimer’s Society.
As part of the build-up, here’s Army officer Simon Wright at speed on the Manchester velodrome. The men successfully completed the near-1,000-mile JOGLE route in just over three days.
In September we headed east to the charming city of Kraków in Poland. It’s another photogenic town, with lots of mediaeval and renaissance architecture. In the main Market Square stands the Cloth Hall, formerly used by merchants and now a tourist attraction.
A few miles from Kraków, at Oświęcim, stands the Nazi concentration camp Auschwitz and its associated death camp at Birkenau. It’s impossible to visit the sites, now the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, without being horrified at the barbarism that resulted in more than a million people, mostly Jews, being murdered as part of the Holocaust.
Back home, here’s a view over Keighley, looking surprisingly silvan in the autumn sunshine. The mixed nature of the town is evident, with estates, terraced housing and a few of the remaining mills that drove its economy from the Victorian age to the latter part of the 20th century. The large tracts of countryside and hillsides clearly denote Keighley as a typical South Pennines post-industrial town.
As the festive season approached, the annual celebrations for the switch on of Keighley’s Christmas lights again drew large crowds. Coronation Street star Antony Cotton helped Santa press the button to illuminate the town.
The stage used to be set up at the junction of Towngate and Bow Street, but latterly moved to the Church Green car park.
2018
The winter Spine Race is one of the most gruelling of the UK’s endurance running events, though you wouldn’t know it from the expression on Tom Hollins’s face. The challenge involves tackling the full 270-mile length of the Pennine Way in January, with the accompanying wintry weather and short daylight hours. Tom, an Airedale Hospital anaesthetist, dropped out of the 2018 race after almost 3½ days on the hoof, having taken the winner’s trophy the previous year.
I’ve lost count of the times I’ve made the ascent up to Top Withins, the ruined moorland farmhouse, the situation of which is said to have been used by Emily Brontë to place Wuthering Heights. In January it was cloaked in its winter cover, looking suitably bleak. The Pennine Way passes the building..
Equally bleak, though most of the snow had been scoured off by the wind, was the summit of Helvellyn in the Lake District. At 950m (3,116ft), it’s the third highest mountain in England. Every day in winter, one of the national park’s three felltop assessors makes the ascent up the hill to give real-time weather and terrain conditions reports. Here’s Zac Poulton struggling to take a wind-speed reading. The maximum that day was 56mph, with a wind-chill of -8C. Zac has a rule of thumb for mountain winds: at 60mph you’ll struggle; 80mph will blow you over; and 100mph will make you airborne.
Once deemed some of the most secretive of the country’s societies, the Freemasons had become more open and invited me, as the Keighley BID photographer, to record the interior of its Cooke Street lodge. Many of the ‘craft’s’ symbols are on view in this shot of the building’s main hall.
Here’s another picture taken on behalf of the Business Improvement District, this time the interior of the popular Cricketers’ Arms pub on Coney Lane. As well as a friendly drinking hole, it was renowned as a gig venue for local bands and singers. Sadly, the pub is no more, having been demolished to make way for the new Aldi supermarket being built on the site.
Some of my time is spent as a Duke of Edinburgh’s Award leader, which enables me to spend time on the hills and in the countryside of our beautiful country. While on a campsite in Wensleydale, I used a convenient drystone wall on which to balance my camera to take a long night-time exposure of this starlit farmland.
In April, Beckfoot Oakbank school commissioned me to photograph the first day of term as it welcomed its students to its new purpose-built premises, constructed beside the old Oakbank School on Oakworth Road.
Former Labour spin-doctor Alastair Campbell, whose father Donald was a vet in Keighley, and who spent his early years in our town, was invited by Dementia Friendly Keighley to open its new premises in the Airedale Shopping Centre. Campbell has spoken and written about his mental health problems, including depression, and has in his later years been a prominent mental health activist.
Keighley town mayor, Cllr Fulzar Ahmed, chairs the meeting in Keighley Town Hall in full civic regalia during the official mayor-making ceremony.
The wood-panelled council chamber where town council meetings take place has been in use since the building opened in 1902, and is now administered by Bradford District Council, though the town council has held its full meetings there since its formation in 2002.
When I’m not photographing, I also write and edit for my online magazine grough, which covers outdoor pursuits. One of the busiest rescue teams is the Ogwen Valley Mountain Rescue Organisation. About 30 per cent of callouts for the team are to one mountain: Tryfan, a rocky peak right beside the A5, which is notoriously difficult to navigate in poor weather and which has many pitfalls for the unwary and which demands the ability to cope with scrambling and exposure to heights.
Chris Lloyd from the mountain rescue team accompanied me up the mountain to point out the various places hillwalkers make mistakes and are likely to come to grief, sadly sometimes with fatal consequences. The feature I wrote following my trip up the mountain with Chris can be seen on grough.
This is the only photograph in this feature that I didn’t take. Because I was too busy flying the plane – well, with a bit of help from the instructor. My son Luke bought me a half-hour flight from Sherburn Aero Club, east of Leeds, during which I was able to take the controls of the light aircraft in the company of a very experienced former airline pilot.
It was a fascinating experience, and we were able to get some great views of York and its surroundings on a fabulous summer’s day. Luke, sitting in the rear seat, took the pictures and has since gone on to qualify as a private pilot, which took a lot more practice than my half hour wiggling the yoke!
I do like to capture images at night and Budapest was a beautiful subject for some nocturnal snapping. The parliament building, on the banks of the River Danube, is hugely impressive and I was just able to capture the image before the floodlights went out at midnight.
My annual trip to Kendal for the town’s Mountain Festival provides a great opportunity to rub shoulders with luminaries of the outdoors world. This portrait of Shauna Coxsey was to accompany an interview with the UK’s premier female sports climber, who went on to represent Great Britain in the Tokyo Olympics in 2021, the first time competition climbing had been included in the modern Games.
Back home for another annual favourite, the switching on of Keighley’s Christmas lights. This year it was the turn of singer Sonia to hit the magic switch, accompanied by Father Christmas.
The Liverpudlian songstress, a protégé of Stock, Aitken and Waterman, had topped the charts in the 1980s and she delighted the crowds gathered at the stage on Church Green.
Another nocturnal outing to a photogenic city, again with a big river running through it. Both my sons attended Newcastle University, and I’ve grown to love Tyneside. Here, the Gateshead Millennium Bridge frames the other Tyne bridges, with the distinctive Sage building mirroring them on the left.
The purpose of our visit to the North-East was to watch the graduation of Luke, who collected his PhD in civil engineering from the university. And no, graduates don’t wear mortar boards at Newcastle, so no photograph of headwear being tossed into the air.
2019
I’m quite an animal lover, but this unusual commission from a farmer near Bradford left me with a lingering memory of my subjects. I can confirm that the porcine scent is very enduring and, despite much scrubbing of my shoes and a 40C clothing wash, there was a lingering reminder of my encounter with the porkers.
Getting all of them to look at the camera rather than grub in the sawdust proved impossible, and I’m not sure I coaxed a smile out of them.
Whenever I visit London, I love to walk around the city, and in April I ambled down from King’s Cross to Westminster, where the Brexit vote campaigning was in full swing. Remain campaigner Steve Bray regularly harangued the broadcast-news camp on College Green, next to the Houses of Parliament, with his megaphone.
Turned out it was all in vain.
I spent much of the summer in the Lake District, practising elements of my hillcraft for my Mountain Leader assessment in August. This involved navigating routes over a few days and wild camping during my mini-expeditions. Here’s my wild camp as the sun sets in Riggindale, with the High Street range in the distance. The area was once home to a pair of golden eagles, now sadly gone.
The following morning I was up at dawn, tent and all my gear packed away and ready for a walk into Mardale and the shores of Haweswater. Here, golden early morning light illuminates the reservoir and conifers, as wild fowl line up on the water.
The transformation of the top of Cavendish Street in Keighley continued in July, with the demolition of the older, 1950s building that formerly housed the town’s technical college, and latterly Keighley College.
Back to the Lake District for another multi-day walk, this time up to Angle Tarn for a wild camp and honing up my night-navigation skills on the peaks in the area. Here’s the monochromatic view of the Helvellyn range as the low, late sun directs crepuscular rays over the mountains.
The training and practice paid off, as I passed my five-day Mountain Leader assessment in August.
From the mountains to one of the flattest countries in Europe, Denmark, and the celebrated statue of Hans Cristian Andersen’s Little Mermaid on the shore of the harbour at Copenhagen. The bronze sculpture by Edvard Eriksen was unveiled on the shore of the city’s waterfront in 1913, and perches on a boulder. It attracts visitors from across the world.
Across the city of Copenhagen lie the Tivoli Gardens, an eclectic mixture of fairground attractions and exotic flora and buildings. This corner of the gardens, a dragon boat lake, has a distinctly oriental atmosphere.
Back to mountain territory and Helvellyn, on a crisp, frosty November day, drifting cloud swirling in the valley of Grisedale, and Striding Edge’s dark profile standing stark.
The ridge is a grade-one scramble, and if you look closely you can just spot figures on its crest, giving scale to its imposing length. Striding Edge offers a challenging ascent route to the summit of England’s third-highest mountain, but requires careful progress. It has been the site of several fatal falls over the past few years.
2020
It’s easy to forget the strange world we were plunged into this year. In March, Prime Minister Boris Johnson instructed the population of the UK they ‘must stay at home’. My outings were curtailed to my local countryside and moors, and commercial commissions dried up.
The Covid-19 pandemic did, however, prompt a kind of unifying social spirit, with a huge surge in support for our NHS staff and other key workers.
This sheep and her lamb in a field near my home were displaying this love for our health workers.
By June, 40,000 people in our country had died from the disease. Slowly restrictions began easing, with widespread testing leading to the lowest number of new cases that year. Social distancing rules were still in place, however, so staff at Airedale Hospital had to maintain a distance from colleagues for this picture celebrating the hospital’s 50th anniversary.
Meanwhile, Keighley-born Captain Sir Tom Moore became a national hero when he completed 100 laps of his home garden to mark his 100th birthday and raised more than £32m for NHS charities. He returned to Keighley to be made an honorary freeman of the town. His memory was sullied after his death by the controversy over the foundation set up by his daughter Hannah Ingham-Moore and investigations by the Charity Commission.
I was still mainly confining my walking to the local moors, and night-time with my headtorch proved a good part of the day to escape any crowded footpaths. Here, the trail of my torch marks my route into the darkness.
In December, the mass vaccination of the population began, and light at the end of the Covid tunnel filtered into the darkness of the worst civil crisis since the Second World War. I covered the first patients receiving the vaccine at Long Lee Surgery in Keighley.
2021
In January 2021 I was commissioned by consultants for the Towns Fund to provide images of our town to support the bid for money. On a cold, wet January I toured Keighley to capture it in all its glory. Here are Dalton Mills before its several fires left it a burnt-out shell.
By now, I was continuing my daily walks on the moors above my home in Oakworth. Quite often, I encountered flocks of greylag geese grazing on the fields. Here, one of these large birds takes to the air in the March sunshine.
It might be thought that May would be a good time to tackle a major record-breaking run. Brian Melia, who was once my optician in Keighley, set out from Settle to attempt the first continuous run of A Pennine Journey, a 398km (247-mile) route first detailed by renowned author Alfred Wainwright who walked the route, up and down the Pennines, in 1938.
Nearing the end of his successful challenge, Brian (right) and a support runner encountered some very unseasonal weather on the summit of Ingleborough.
Another runner battling the British weather was American John Kelly who posted the fastest complete traverse of the 431km Pennine Way, in a time of 2 days, 10 hours, 4 minutes and 53 seconds.
Here he is on the flanks of Dodd Fell in the Yorkshire Dales during a sharp shower.
With pandemic travel restriction easing, I took the opportunity to embark on a three-day walk in the Lake District. All was going well until I received a call to say I’d been in close contact with someone who had been diagnosed with Covid-19 and I needed to self-isolate. Since I was in the middle of the mountains, with little daylight left, travelling solo with barely another soul in sight, I decided to make my way to upper Eskdale to wild camp.
It meant curtailing my planned three-day walk to two days so I could walk back to my car, still more than 12 hours away near Coniston. Here I am at nightfall in the wilds of the Central Fells.
July meant another trip to Tyneside to visit our son Luke. Here are the bridges over the Tyne on a gloomy, wet summer’s day.
I was commissioned in August to photograph a couple’s civil partnership ceremony and celebration at Bradford Register Office. Though the happy couple have uncovered faces, you can note that others at the gathering, including me, still had to wear face masks as the chance of Covid-19 infection was still high.
And so to Manchester for the filming by Ashley Yarwood of a music video for my son Tom’s band Gold Jacks.
The theme was the return of the band at a club where their performance was less than enthusiastically received. I even got to make a cameo appearance in the video as one of the audience members.
The following month I was in London to visit friends. As usual I managed to have a good wander round the capital. These doors in Spitalfields, east London, caught my eye.
The mass vaccination against Covid-19 continued throughout the year. In October I was at Airedale Hospital to capture images of staff there inoculating members of the public. This clinician had a tongue-in-cheek title.
Back to Salford Quays in November for another visit to The Lowry and a chance to photograph the bright lights of Media City reflected in the dark waters of the Manchester Ship Canal.
There’s always an excellent turnout at Keighley’s Remembrance Day events, and it’s good to see all of the town’s communities, and all ages, participating. Here, two schoolchildren carry their poppy wreath to lay at the cenotaph.
And, nearing the year’s end, the switch-on of Keighley’s Christmas lights was accompanied by an impressive fireworks display around Church Green.
2022
A commission in Sheffield, where I did my training back in 1983 and 1984, and the chance to fly my new drone, a Christmas present.
Here’s a view of Park Hill flats, with the city’s railway station just visible in the bottom left corner of the picture.
In March I travelled down to the National Exhibition Centre in Birmingham for the Outdoor Expo, and a chance to listen to broadcaster Julia Bradbury, who has done more than many to popularise leisure walking, particularly the hills detailed by author Alfred Wainwright.
More flying of my drone, this time in Cliffe Castle park, Keighley, with an overhead view of the ornamental pond and its central fountain, looking jewel-like surrounded by late spring trees coming into leaf.
In June I headed north to Scotland, to make the ascent, with friends, of Stac Polaidh, a rocky mountain in the remote north-west Highlands. This is the view of neighbouring Suilven from the summit col of the hill.
Liverpool, the birthplace of my maternal grandfather, is always worth a visit. This drone shot shows the city sparkling at night, with the foreground filled with the Three Graces buildings at the Pier Head: the Cunard Building, the Royal Liver Building and the Port of Liverpool Building.
The Albert Dock area is to the right of the picture and both the city’s cathedrals can be seen near the skyline.
I covered the Bradford Literature Festival again in July, with broadcaster Robert Peston getting demonstrative on the stage.
The following month, Keighley hosted the Yorkshire Society’s celebrations to mark Yorkshire Day, including this procession up Cavendish Street, led by a town crier.
A few days in Edinburgh enabled another nocturnal excursion with the camera, to Calton Hill, from where there’s a great view of the city looking resplendent by night, with the castle visible on the skyline.
In late autumn I was in the West Midlands, rekindling my fondness for the area and for Coventry in particular. On 19 November there was a sombre mood, as the cathedral’s tolling bell echoed across the city, and members of the public watched the ceremonies for Queen Elizabeth’s funeral on a giant screen next the cathedral.
In October, we headed north to join my son Luke for his wedding to long-term partner Gav near Barnard Castle. Happy to report my eyesight held up and a grand day was had by all.
The same month, Keighley Creative staged its arts and film festival, and the Bradford Belles brought their mature mayhem to the streets of our town.
2023
As a new year ushered in some proper wintry weather, my daily walk on the moors gave me time to reflect on the beauty of the countryside surrounding our town. In this drone picture, a low sun fails to warm up a decidedly frozen landscape.
Another visit to Merseyside, and an elevated view of the Isle of Man ferry heading downstream on the river as it heads towards the Irish Sea at sunset.
Another commission photographing Bradford Literature Festival included a prescient booking of the then shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves, who less than a year later would take the reins at the Treasury.
While supervising a Duke of Edinburgh’s Award expedition in the Yorkshire Dales, a break in the rain prompted the arrival of this striking rainbow. I searched in vain in the barn near Kettlewell for that elusive pot of gold.
A few days later I pulled on my boots again for a yomp up the Pennine Way, which I’d had in my sights for a few years. I completed the 270-mile distance in 13 days, 10 of which were in typical British summer weather: windy, wet and cool.
Here, the clouds started to break as I looked back to the air-traffic-system radomes on Great Dun Fell from the highest point on the Pennines, Cross Fell, with the route visible southwards across the high moorland.
Warmer weather as we headed to the Mediterranean. We owed a visit to the Côte d’Azur as we were about to fly to the South of France in 2020 when Covid-19 lockdown struck. So in September we spent a few days in Nice, with a day trip to the monied principality of Monaco. This is the casino at Monte Carlo, responsible for much of the country’s wealth.
Keighley Creative staged a great event, devised by Naseem Darbey and the team: the Mega Drawing Box. Keighley folk of all ages were able to add their artistic creations to the white walls of the giant box, assembled in the former Beales store.
A press trip to Northumberland and the chance to capture a nocturnal shot of Bamburgh Castle and the beach. I had to balance the camera on my bag for the 30-second exposure, as I’d forgotten the mounting plate of my tripod.
And on a chilly November evening, Bradford star Gareth Gates took to the stage in Keighley to lead the celebrations for the switch on of the town’s Christmas lights.
And so we arrive in 2024, ten years after beginning my journey into freelance life. In January I captured events at the I Am Brill event organised by Keighley Creative. Lots of families had a great time at the event at Victoria Hall.
Although my work for the charity is, as a trustee, necessarily pro bono, I find it great to be part of such an organisation, brightening the lives of townsfolk.
Also in January, I made my now customary journey south on the Pennine Way to photograph runners tackling the Spine Race, which involves covering the full 270-mile length of the national trail in winter conditions with minimal daylight hours. Here’s a competitor making their way north at Windy Hill, just before crossing the M62.
We decided to travel overland to Belgium, rather than fly, and our Eurostar train brought us to Brussels, from where we made tracks to Bruges and then Antwerp. Here’s the Grote Markt in the latter city, with its distinctive Flemish architecture.
I was commissioned to cover a training day at Airedale Hospital where clinicians, mostly consultant doctors and other medics, increased their skills in the use of ultrasound as a diagnostic tool.
Just one day’s work commissioned this year in July at the Bradford Literature Festival. Television celebrity Ruby Wax took to the stage at St George’s Hall for her performance.
I travelled to London to create some corporate photos for the team at My Ark, a start-up where my son Luke has joined colleagues Cathy and Jen in developing the company and its financial data programs and apps. The trio wanted to steer away from staid boardroom portraits, so we ventured to the Millennium Bridge for some relaxed shots.
In September, we took the train to Bristol for a few days in a very creative city. Here’s a shot towards the harbour, with the city’s cathedral in the foreground and Bristol’s noted multi-coloured terraces beyond.
Keighley Business Improvement District has been reborn, and has commissioned me to take images for business profiles. Here’s a mono shot the owner of a restaurant wanted, to showcase their cocktails.
A welcome return, too, to Keighley and Airedale Business Awards, where BBC weatherman Paul Hudson again hosted the evening. Paul, who has born in Keighley, had an interest in meteorology from his childhood, when he had a weather station in his back garden.
Another trip in November to Cumbria, where mountaineering elder statesman Sir Chris Bonington carried out the opening ceremony for Kendal Mountain Festival. Sir Chris, now 90, is a patron of the event, which draws thousands of outdoor enthusiasts to the town.
And finally back to my home town, where Storm Bert forced a late change to an indoor event by Keighley Town Council for the annual Christmas lights switch on. Musician Ellie Sax kept the crowds entertained with her upbeat performance.
I hope the pictures on this page give a demonstration of the variety of working as a freelance photographer and why I intend to continue pointing my lenses at interesting subjects as long as I’m able.
