Our family moved a lot when I was young. We traveled from England to Bangladesh when I was three, where my father worked as a biology teacher for the British Council. I was too young to remember many details about Bangladesh. But some events are still fixed in my memory, especially those involving nature, which was never far away. For example, there was the time our neighbor shot a panther in the jungle just behind our house. To me it looked like an overgrown pussy cat and I was very sad to see its limp body. I also remember feeling sorry and a little scared of the huge tiger-skins that hung in our neighbor’s house, especially since I knew some had been man-eating tigers that lived nearby.
At nights I would fall asleep to the laughing calls of jackals running past my bedroom window, and one morning I woke to find a slow Loris on our verandah. It’s a very furry relative of a monkey and looked like a wonderful living stuffed toy. My mother has since told me of many other animal incidents, like the banded krait (also called the one-minute snake) that was discovered in the playground and the tiger paw prints we found in our garden one day.
I started taking photographs at age nine when I borrowed my sister’s box brownie camera. We lived in Khartoum in the Sudan at that time, and it was an exciting place for a boy. I loved to explore the winding streets of the souk (bazaar). There were dark-skinned traders from the south and Arab traders from the north, and tiny shop filled with cheap watches, silver jewelry, ancient muskets, elephant skin shields and old spears. It seemed almost anything could be found in the souk. To me, it was filled with the adventure of Africa.
When I was14 we moved to Goroka in the Highlands of New Guinea where I home-schooled for 4 years, while attending the local high school (being the only white schoolboy) part-time. Without other white teenagers for company I went “walkabout” at weekends to local villages, persuading their elders to take me on hunting trips into the mountains for birds of paradise. They were intent on shooting them with their bows and arrows, while I was hopeful of photographing them with an old camera. In time I became fluent in Pidgin English and spent hours asking the elders all about their customs, and what stone-age life was like before they first met Europeans.
When I was sixteen and seventeen, I did some very long trips by foot and dugout canoe over mountain ranges and into distant unmapped regions. I carried both a camera and a tape recorder to record the customs, music and folklore of the people I visited. Many had never seen or heard a tape recorder before (or seen a teenage white boy for that matter) so the novelty would draw an entire village into one hut for an evening of song and music, punctuated by fits of laughter as individuals recognized each other on tape. I traveled with local people on these trips and was entirely dependent on the generosity of the villagers, who were always kind to me and let me stay in their thatch houses. The older women would chuckle with maternal dismay that I wasn't safely at home with my parents. But after a week or two I'd turn up back home with assorted fleas and sometimes strange diseases that would have my mother worried and doctors shrugging their shoulders.
I completed my graduate training in biology in England in 1977, and afterwards traveled for several months by train, bus, rickshaw and antique ferry from London to Bangladesh, crossing Europe, Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India and Bangladesh; and then flying to New Zealand, where I felt I’d arrived in paradise. Apart from a year as an itinerant laborer traveling from farm to farm across the Australian outback (snakes, crocodiles and some colorful workmates), I settled in New Zealand for 17 years and became a citizen there. I took a variety of jobs and then started a PhD, but spent almost every spare moment hiking and exploring alpine wilderness of New Zealand’s Southern Alps. It was one long wonderful adventure, filled with awesome landscapes and occasional anxious moments with flooded rivers, ice avalanches and high winds.
I took a succession of cameras on these trips and after few years I had enough good photos to do my first book, called "Untouched Horizons" (1989), which was about the wilderness landscapes of the South Island. This was followed by several other books for adults about New Zealand’s Natural History, which I both wrote and illustrated.
Although I had never considered doing children’s books, it became evident that young readers liked some of my photographs, especially those of animals like frogs, insects and spiders. My biological training, and my upbringing by biologist parents, had helped spark an interest in the smaller animal that others sometime overlook. So perhaps it was not surprising that I had a call from a children’s educational publisher wishing to produce nonfiction books. They explained how some children do not respond well to fictional books and their interest in reading can languish as a result. I realized, on looking back to my early school years, that I was one of those children who didn’t take to fiction. Reading never held my interest until much later when I discovered books that were about the real world of science, nature and adventure.
Switching from adult to children’s books was quite easy, for me. As a writer one has to work with a reduced palette in terms of vocabulary and sentence construction. But as a photographer, very little change is needed. Even the youngest of children can interpret sophisticated images of nature. So I invest all the same skills and efforts in photographing for children that I do for adults. The work is every bit as rewarding, and I’m happy to say, a lot more fun.
In 1994 my wife was offered a research position at Harvard University, so we packed bags once more and moved to Boston. Since then I have lived in the United States and worked exclusively on children’s book. Each new title I work on is a whole new adventure for me. I have been lucky to explore many new places while taking photographs. One recent book even took me back to New Guinea, for first time in 25 years!
At nights I would fall asleep to the laughing calls of jackals running past my bedroom window, and one morning I woke to find a slow Loris on our verandah. It’s a very furry relative of a monkey and looked like a wonderful living stuffed toy. My mother has since told me of many other animal incidents, like the banded krait (also called the one-minute snake) that was discovered in the playground and the tiger paw prints we found in our garden one day.
I started taking photographs at age nine when I borrowed my sister’s box brownie camera. We lived in Khartoum in the Sudan at that time, and it was an exciting place for a boy. I loved to explore the winding streets of the souk (bazaar). There were dark-skinned traders from the south and Arab traders from the north, and tiny shop filled with cheap watches, silver jewelry, ancient muskets, elephant skin shields and old spears. It seemed almost anything could be found in the souk. To me, it was filled with the adventure of Africa.
When I was14 we moved to Goroka in the Highlands of New Guinea where I home-schooled for 4 years, while attending the local high school (being the only white schoolboy) part-time. Without other white teenagers for company I went “walkabout” at weekends to local villages, persuading their elders to take me on hunting trips into the mountains for birds of paradise. They were intent on shooting them with their bows and arrows, while I was hopeful of photographing them with an old camera. In time I became fluent in Pidgin English and spent hours asking the elders all about their customs, and what stone-age life was like before they first met Europeans.
When I was sixteen and seventeen, I did some very long trips by foot and dugout canoe over mountain ranges and into distant unmapped regions. I carried both a camera and a tape recorder to record the customs, music and folklore of the people I visited. Many had never seen or heard a tape recorder before (or seen a teenage white boy for that matter) so the novelty would draw an entire village into one hut for an evening of song and music, punctuated by fits of laughter as individuals recognized each other on tape. I traveled with local people on these trips and was entirely dependent on the generosity of the villagers, who were always kind to me and let me stay in their thatch houses. The older women would chuckle with maternal dismay that I wasn't safely at home with my parents. But after a week or two I'd turn up back home with assorted fleas and sometimes strange diseases that would have my mother worried and doctors shrugging their shoulders.
I completed my graduate training in biology in England in 1977, and afterwards traveled for several months by train, bus, rickshaw and antique ferry from London to Bangladesh, crossing Europe, Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India and Bangladesh; and then flying to New Zealand, where I felt I’d arrived in paradise. Apart from a year as an itinerant laborer traveling from farm to farm across the Australian outback (snakes, crocodiles and some colorful workmates), I settled in New Zealand for 17 years and became a citizen there. I took a variety of jobs and then started a PhD, but spent almost every spare moment hiking and exploring alpine wilderness of New Zealand’s Southern Alps. It was one long wonderful adventure, filled with awesome landscapes and occasional anxious moments with flooded rivers, ice avalanches and high winds.
I took a succession of cameras on these trips and after few years I had enough good photos to do my first book, called "Untouched Horizons" (1989), which was about the wilderness landscapes of the South Island. This was followed by several other books for adults about New Zealand’s Natural History, which I both wrote and illustrated.
Although I had never considered doing children’s books, it became evident that young readers liked some of my photographs, especially those of animals like frogs, insects and spiders. My biological training, and my upbringing by biologist parents, had helped spark an interest in the smaller animal that others sometime overlook. So perhaps it was not surprising that I had a call from a children’s educational publisher wishing to produce nonfiction books. They explained how some children do not respond well to fictional books and their interest in reading can languish as a result. I realized, on looking back to my early school years, that I was one of those children who didn’t take to fiction. Reading never held my interest until much later when I discovered books that were about the real world of science, nature and adventure.
Switching from adult to children’s books was quite easy, for me. As a writer one has to work with a reduced palette in terms of vocabulary and sentence construction. But as a photographer, very little change is needed. Even the youngest of children can interpret sophisticated images of nature. So I invest all the same skills and efforts in photographing for children that I do for adults. The work is every bit as rewarding, and I’m happy to say, a lot more fun.
In 1994 my wife was offered a research position at Harvard University, so we packed bags once more and moved to Boston. Since then I have lived in the United States and worked exclusively on children’s book. Each new title I work on is a whole new adventure for me. I have been lucky to explore many new places while taking photographs. One recent book even took me back to New Guinea, for first time in 25 years!
Travelling to Bangladesh. I'm the youngest.
Our neighbor with the panther.
Me (right) with siblings and friends.
New Guinea elder.
Hiking in New Guinea wilderness.
Crossing Bismark Range in New Guinea
Climbing in New Zealand.
Southern Alps, New Zealand.
Sunrise from high camp.
Southern Alps, New Zealand
About Me
Text and photographs are copyright.