Trinity was where I became seriously interested in photography. My father had always taken lots of photographs of the family with his beautiful Voightlander Camera. Those were the days when you sent films away to be developed so we did not see the fruits of his work till many weeks later.

I had a friend who was in the Trinity Photographic Society and he introduced me to the magic of the darkroom and the science of developing and printing film. I can remember the strong, sour smell of the chemicals used in the process. It was nothing short of magic to watch a sheet of white photographic paper slowly transform itself into an image. In the dim orange light of the darkroom you would see a faint shadow emerge which gradually deepened into the outlines of the image. You would fish it out at the right moment with a pair of tongs and drop it in the fixing bath. Then you'd have to patiently wash it under the tap to eliminate all the chemicals from the paper. Finally you hung it out to dry.

If you were ambitious, you used gloss photographic paper and flattened the print under canvas against a heated plate to produce a smooth reflective finish. This was a lot harder than it looked and I rarely succeeded in producing an exhibition quality print this way.

This long process gave you a sense of ownership of the image in a way that modern digital photography does not. You really did 'make' the image and its final quality was a factor of the skill of the developer. Taking the photo was one step in a longer process which required skill and patience if it was to be done properly. The effort involved also meant that you curated images a lot more carefully than you do now. Nobody wanted to waste expensive photo paper and labour on a mediocre image. You would scan a set of 36 exposures carefully to choose the one or two images that were really worth printing.

Before you even got to the darkroom you exercised a lot more editorial control than you do now with digital. You didn't just click away hoping to get a good shot. Each frame cost money, and indeed time, in the developing of the film.

All of this made us cautious photographers. We knew that there were only 36 shots on the film so we thought carefully before we pressed the shutter. This was a great apprenticeship to the difficult skill of knowing when to click and when to walk away.

In those days we also had more in the way of photographers who were role models. Now the internet is awash with millions, perhaps billions, of photographs and it is difficult to find the good among the dross. I can remember being captivated by the work of Eisenstein and transfixed and disturbed by Diane Arbus. Now the examples are Mario Testino and his ilk whose pufffed up, self-important, facile and ultimately empty work stares back at us vacantly.

For many, many years, I took photographs like a magpie. I would collect diverse images but there was no thread that linked them together into a coherent whole. Yes, they were beautiful but ultimately they did not speak with any discernible voice. It took me till I was well over 40 to realise that photography is not a set of discreet words it's a language. The problem was, I wasn't sure what I wanted to say with that language.

At a certain point in my 50's, I began to realise that I was drawn to a moodiness and indistinctness in landscape. We often think of landscape in terms of sun washed mountains and lush green pastures. For me, the beauty of the land lay in its ambiguity. When mist and cloud come, we have to guess what is hidden. Icy cold, deadly ravines can be hidden in sparkling snowy mountains. It wasn't that I saw this as metaphor for my mental state, but it helped me to understand the complex reality of beauty and darkness existing in the same landscape. Mists can roll in suddenly and just as swiftly, the sun can burn them off to reveal the calm beneath.

I consciously sought out landscape that clothed itself in ambiguity. Often this meant getting up before dawn to capture that brief moment when mist shrouds pastures before the sun pierces through. I learned that just as we cannot trust that happiness will last we also have to realise that the darkness of the mind can evaporate as suddenly as it came. Sunlight and darkness play across the landscape of our minds and we have to have the patience and insight to understand the ephemeral nature of both joy and sorrow.