Italians just infuse everything with beauty and passion. It’s in their food. Their buildings. Their fashion, music, art. Every vista is a postcard. Florence, Italy, 2004
Experimenting with breaking the rule of thirds. I think it works.
It was this alleyway scene in a back street of Rhodes Town that triggered a new collection: I collect photos of Vespas and other scooters in interesting contexts.
This first one is still my favourite. The contrasting silvered textures of the wall, cobblestones and the front of the scooter are just beautiful.
Don't you wish you were there, right now?
(Rhodes, Greece, 2002)
I am drawn to the seashore at sunset as a moth is to a flame. I could never live inland; after more than 48 hours in a landlocked city I get edgy and the nearest river or lake becomes a magnet.
When I am standing on a beach, watching the sun dip below the horizon (and never seeing the green flash!), I get a strong sense that the water before me is the same water that’s lapping on the sands at the beach down the road from my home. And it’s the same water I stood before in Fiji, California, Thailand, Tahiti and numerous other places. No matter where in the world I am, if I can be down by the shore as the sun is setting, I feel at home.
Italy. Never anything less than 'bella'.
Capri, Italy, 2002
This field of Umbrian sunflowers makes me think of fans at a music concert. I wonder who they’re there to see? Robert Plant? Tree 63? Or perhaps the Rolling Stones? 
Love the Italian word for sunflower - girasole: turn with the sun
I detested history as a subject at school and gave it up as soon as I could. Never saw the point of knowing in which year things happened (plus we had to study the Afrikaner Groot Trek every year – yawn). It’s corny to say that history comes alive when you visit historical places, but it’s true. Few places on earth must be as moving to visit as the former concentration camps (now museums) in Germany.
Lifeless yet deeply moving.
Dachau was a moving, sobering stop on a coach-camping-sightseeing-and-drinking tour of Europe in 1996 – and the kind of place everyone should visit once in their lifetime in order to comprehend the human capacity for inhumanity. On a similar tour the following year we stopped at Auschwitz, where I stayed in the car park. Visiting a second concentration camp was just too much – learning that history lesson once was enough.
I’ll never forget the atmosphere at Dachau. Tangibly awful: such sadness, such evil. Strangely, there is almost no life there. Not a bird, not an ant. Only ghosts. (Dachau, Germany, 1996)
You can almost feel the stillness.
Have you noticed how different the light is in different parts of the world? The clear but often blinding glare in the southern Mediterranean; the filtered greyness of the UK; the warmth in the light in Africa. Although more subdued than Capri’s usual bella luce, the light on this November evening set off the ripples around the island’s imposing Faraglioni perfectly. (Italy, 2003)
Now if it was a *sandy* beach, it'd be just perfect!
Is it the light? Variations in depth? Or differences in water temperature? Whatever caused this part of the Aegean Sea off Rhodes to be striped in shades of blue, it’s breathtaking! (Greece – 2002)