It's a funny moment when you’re walking through isolated, rocky terrain in Spain, looking for the perfect situation to capture, and suddenly you hear the sounds of a photography podcast of somebody walking through the countryside in the UK talking about foxes.

There is seldom a fox to be seen here, only recently with the confinement I did spot some, but alas there are also plenty of hunters shooting at everything that moves. They leave their own tracks of cans, empty wine bottles and bullet casings. I’m a newbie to podcasts, but really enjoy the episodes of Photography Daily. The many perspectives and voices in the photographic universe are really refreshing and great food for thought.

I walk, more or less, the same route with the dogs every day, depending upon the season. In winter the mushroom route, and in spring the wild asparagus route. Foraging food for the stomach as well as for the eye, I take my camera along with me as well as a bag for the findings.

Six years ago I bought a Nikon D5300 to be able to take photos and videos of my wife's concerts. She's a professional violinist and plays in, amongst others, a Balkan and a Klezmer band. Three years ago she also started playing with an improvisation group, with dance as well, and that became a wonderful new challenge as there was often very little lighting and a lot of movement. A tough learning school, dancers in the dark, but great fun.

Although photography has been a relatively new passion for me I didn’t start from nothing. It was more reconnecting with a lot of things from the past. My father was actually a photographer, doing opera and commercial gigs. We had a dark room at home and a shop selling film roles too. He explained to me a thousand times the meaning of aperture, shutter speed and ISO, so the knowledge was there, but not developed so to speak. Instead of following my father, I decided to go to art school instead, as my mother, and her father before her, had done. I studied painting and drawing.

But life is strange. My father died last year in February, just as I was finding myself becoming more and more involved with photography. So now, having past 50, I’m finally following in his footsteps!

I recently bought a Fuji XT3 as an upgrade of my Nikon. The main reason was that I could not change the aperture while in screen mode and had to switch constantly from viewer mode to screen mode and back again. This delay was often the reason for missing that amazing moment. Well, probably the downside of the upgrade is that I can’t blame the camera any more when pictures go wrong.

Due to the Covid crisis this last year, most of the concerts and performances stopped, so I decided to do more photography closer to home, during my walks with our three dogs. I have been trying to capture nature and its relationship with human activity. It’s amazing how many lost souls, shoes, dolls and balls I find in the strangest of places. The childrens’ toys are actually a bit sad and even scary at times. You wonder about the stories behind them: they were once brand new, and perhaps bought for a child on his or her birthday? What a life they must have led and what stories could they tell? And how on earth did they end up on a deserted mountain buried amongst the leaves & stones?

There’s also a ‘ruined’ caravan nearby, which I pass every day. It’s a caravan that reminds me strongly of the film ‘Into the Wild.’ It's an empty, desolate piece of shelter, probably once used by some workers or hunters. It’s an odd thing, in the middle of nowhere, and once I even found a snake living in there. But even he (or she) found the caravan too gloomy.

I think the camera has helped me to look at the world and see it in closer detail. I find it very interesting to see how things that once belonged to the human society, find a new purpose. Things thrown away, disposed of, find a new identity and are making friends with rocks, earth, trees, herbs and wild plants. The artificial man-made objects become natural, once again. Those moments, that gradually evolve, have become an inspiration on my daily photowalk.

Last October I showed my photos in the APT Gallery in London together with fellow artist friends, under the name Groundwork. The artists come from all disciplines; sculpture, painting, printing and poetry. We are all inspired by our walks, and the observations of the environments in which we live. As October was not really a great month for an exhibition with all the Covid restrictions, we decided, together with the APT Gallery, to make a follow up, exactly a year later in 2021.

Maybe I’m a die hard optimist, wanting to see beauty even in the rubbish around us, but it’s a mindset. You can see the ugliness of humanity in a dangling white plastic bag in a tree, or you can see the poetry of the dancing shapes in the wind. A thought struck me the other day, whilst taking a walk, which is: would we make different products if we considered a plastic bag to be part of nature?

Too often we refer to nature as something outside of us, the beautiful trees, and animals, the sea and the clouds. But as the saying goes; "We are all made of stardust,” and therefore plastic bags too. What if we didn't have the dividing notion of nature and human kind. Would we still make the same products? Or would we make products that make more ecological sense?

Ah well, you ponder a lot while making photos on a walk.

APT Groundwork project on Instagram