Pictures are what brings a place alive, giving it light, depth, colour, emotion, and every editor knows that. Acres of perfectly chiselled prose just cannot stand up to that visual snap, frozen in time.

I've always been seduced by the instant and ephemeral side of photography, partly because I always seem to be on the run. From the mid-1980s onwards I amassed thousands of 35mm slides covering people and landscapes from Madagascar to Kashmir, Mali to Guatemala, Corsica to the Brazilian Amazon. Many have been published through three different picture libraries or were supplied directly by me. I so miss that moment of getting boxes of slides back from processing and sitting down to look at them on the light-box. It was another journey, one of reliving the first.

What has changed is the digital age and I confess to having been slow on the uptake. While my trusty old Nikon SLR (that survived hurricanes and sand-storms) gathers dust, I'm only just beginning to catch up. My first experiments were with the basic but excellent Sony Cybershot P200 which they've sadly stopped manufacturing. Many of the snapshots here were taken with it in 2006-2007 - until that damned dust appeared on the sensor. ThenI upgraded slightly to a Panasonic Lumix DMC-LX2 which has more versatility and megapixels, but somehow doesn't quite pack the same punch.

Finally I've moved on to an SLR. It was a tough call as every manufacturer is upping their game in this highly competitive market. Nikon? Canon? Pentax? Sony? In the end I went for ease and relative lightness and chose the Nikon D60. Watch this space...