All I really wanted to do was wildlife photography.

I carry a notebook full of sketches of pictures I want to take - they are really scruffy sketches, but at least I am going out there with a clear objective.

My first serious project was photographing badgers - very, very difficult as they are shy and nocturnal.

So about twenty years ago I gave up on painting - and got into terrible debt after buying a load of camera gear!

A large wildlife book, start to finish, could take one to two years, but then I would expect to get several good (nature) magazine features off the back of this, plus of course a lot of stock.

Close encounters are bad. Bad for the animal, as it causes stress, and bad for me for exactly the same reason.

In The States I would have no edge, no advantage at all.

The Kalahari is brilliant - and easy to visit.

Photography started as a means of getting reference material for my paintings of nature subjects.

For the first few years we lived in a tiny rented cottage at the bottom of a friend's garden. We often joked that there was plenty of film in the fridge, but not too much food!

Currently I am working on another three books, doing a lot of magazine work, am shooting for fifteen stock agencies, plus my own photo library - all this keeps me quite busy!

Your qualifications, your CV, are not your life, though you will meet many people of my age and older who confuse the two.

Doesn´t matter who you are or what you believe. Everybody has a ghost story

The more tightly packed the group, the greater the need for strict social ranks and orders.

The poetry of fashion lies in the creation of illusion

it doesn t matter if it takes a long time getting there; the point is to have a destination.

People are complicated; you put two of them together and it's generally a mess, but hopefully a beautiful mess.

The most violent appetites in all creatures are lust and hunger; the first is a perpetual call upon them to propagate their kind, the latter to preserve themselves.

Choose, but don't want.

People keep trying to make me a movie star but they just don't understand. I'm not a movie star, I'm an actor.

my sitters get tired waiting for commissioned portraits. If they commission me they have to wait years sometimes because I discard so many.