Brian Naughton

I am a UK-based fine art photographer. My subject matter spans various genres, including landscapes, portraiture, architecture, still life, street photography and reportage.

I guess I'm essentially a photojournalist in the purest sense of the word -- someone who seeks to capture the world around him as he experiences it. Much of my current artistic inspiration relates to what the great photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson called 'the decisive moment'. He also said that taking a photo is "to hold one's breath, when all faculties converge to capture fleeting reality". That encapsulates what I think is so magical about photography as a medium. It's why photos interest me more than moving images: it's about the alchemy of the moment.

Most of the time -- as happens with most photographers -- the truly meaningful moments elude me. (Or perhaps I elude them -- and that's another story.) But occasionally, one's intuition pays off, or you get lucky. You happen upon the right light, the right action in the frame, the right point of view. The image possesses a visual cadence or a serendipitous layer of symbolism. And even in the digital age, sometimes you don't know what you've got until you get it home and onto a larger screen -- w...

I have had no formal training in photography but I have been taking pictures since before I could ride a bike, which is now a regrettably long time ago! My formal education, a BSc in Software Systems for the Arts and Media, began the year that Tim Berners-Lee unleashed the WWW on a largely unsuspecting world, so it was an interesting time to be exploring the future of the arts and media in a software and networking context. The degree also touched on lots of areas that I subsequently found relevant to photography, such as semiotics and the language of visual communication.

In terms of learning how to take pictures, my father was a keen amateur photographer so I guess you could say it's in my blood. He taught me the basics when I was a kid -- light meters, aperture priority and creative use of depth of field, developing black and white film, taking macro shots, etc. I learnt pretty much by osmosis and then when I left home by trial and error. People can get hung up on the technical stuff I think. There's a freelance documentary photographer called Balazs Gardi who recently shot Afghanistan on an iPhone -- the resulting collection of images - 'The War in Hipstamatic' - is a thing of great beauty.