I take photos entirely for my own pleasure and enjoy the process of taking them more than the product it results in. I put them in this gallery not to publish them to a wider world, but as the digital equivalent of printing them to look at myself and show to family and friends.

Being lazy and unsystematic, I do very little post-processing, preferring to get it right (or wrong) in camera. You can identify conversion to monochrome and most cropping just by looking. The only hidden changes are straightening horizons, correcting colour balance and adjusting levels where my preference for slight underexposure has made a photo too murky.

What is distinctive of photography as a representational medium is that it operates under a constraint: a photograph, as opposed to a painting, is restricted to represent what the viewer could have seen for themselves. What makes a photograph visually interesting to the viewer is nearly always that they would not have seen what the photographer saw, be it a detail, a juxtaposition, a perspective, the 'decisive' moment or the composition.

I also have a photo journal: http://www.blipfoto.com/tomstoneham