A still summer night in London. T70 / Portra 400.

I’m up in Scotland again and tomorrow I meet my new niece, Aoife! It seems like the next generation of our family appeared out of nowhere and all of a sudden there’s loads of kids and they’re all fab. Living in London, I don’t get to see enough of any of them but it’s better than when we lived in Sydney, as we’d only see the family once a year, at Christmas.

I’ve been shooting some portraits and tests recently and feel re-energised and creatively productive. I also feel less precious about what I should be doing and in the mood to take on all types of work. This year I want to drop any pretence and be myself without guilt.

Activities like running, reading and gardening all feed into a positive mindset and the more I do, the more I’m able to do.

Lots of fun things planned while we are up in Edinburgh and, like always, it will be over in a flash and we’ll be back on the train to London. Dinners, baby meetings and festival shows fit into a couple of days.

Alexis gave me a few of her gorgeous plates that were broken in transit and I got some two-part epoxy to join them. It worked well and they seem to be really solid under pressure, but now i need to remove the excess. I hear open razor blades are recommended, but stanley blades barely worked for me. I was looking at small planes and tried sandpaper but nothing working yet. Hopefully I’ll figure it out so I can start using them.

What have you been working on in your free time?

Inchcolm (the island behind the tree) taken from Silver Sands, Fife, on my Canon T70 with Kodak Portra 400.

Since moving from Sydney to London last year, Becky and I have been able to visit Scotland much more frequently, especially because we had our wedding to organise and wanted to see more of our nephews and nieces. Missing out on seeing these family babies growing up has to be the worst thing about living on the other side of the planet.

This time we were up North for a couple of birthdays – including my Grandma’s which involved the whole family coming together.

Guardian of the Bridges by Debbie Ryan, a sculpture in South Queensferry, near my sister Melissa’s house where I had my birthday lunch earlier this year. Canon T70 / Kodak Portra 400. 

I love this sculpture, it’s so colourful, magical and its face reminds me of playing Pokemon in the 90s with my sister who now lives nearby.

Inchcolm again, on my Canon T70 with Kodak Portra 400. My school “house” was ‘Inchcolm’ (instead of Gryffindor – though our colours were red, which I take great joy in) so I feel like I have a connection to this little island on the Forth, which I have also been fortunate to visit thanks to my dad and his fishing boat.

I’m delighted with the colours and contrast in these images. When I returned to shooting on film, the landscapes that initially inspired me were by Cody Cobb. I found his work (especially this featured one from The Island) to be warm and nostalgic, like he had found the key to capturing the rose-tinted idyllic memory of a place, rather than the cold and clinical version perhaps with a blown-out sky that you often get with digital, and especially phone, photography.

While I’m talking about landscapes, a series that I have loved for years is Nadav Kander’s Yangtze, The Long River. The tones and layers created by the thick air between distances is incredible.