In August 2017, I travelled to the United States for the first time for a trip to the Grand Teton and Yellowstone National Parks, which was timed to coincide with a total solar eclipse. I left you last time having arrived in West Yellowstone.

In August 2017, I travelled to the United States for the first time for a trip to the Grand Teton and Yellowstone National Parks, which was timed to coincide with a total solar eclipse. The point of entry was Salt Lake City from where we would connect to Jackson Hole. It has to be said that my arrival was the most ignominious I have made anywhere!

Many years ago, I went to Kenya and had always had a wish to go back to Africa. In October 2018, I finally returned to the continent, with Zimbabwe as my destination; a beautiful but troubled country.

What do you think of when you hear the word ‘Transylvania’? Dracula, the Rocky Horror Show? What about ‘Romania’? Ceaușescu? Who can forget the awful images of the Romanian orphanages that emerged in 1989? Brutal Communist architecture? That’s pretty much what I had in my head when I booked a photo trip to Transylvania. To be honest, I didn’t even know exactly where it was in Romania!

‘Spain sounds a bit tame’ was the general response I got to my proposed trip to Albarracín back in June. Ok, it’s not Mongolia or China but, apart from a trip to Majorca as a teenager, I’d not been to Spain and I find any new destination exciting; it’s the discovery of the unknown that is the draw. And part of that draw was the fact that Albarracín is a medieval town that hasn’t changed much over the centuries.

Photography is all about being in the right place at the right time to get the light, and you’ll often hear photographers talk about ‘chasing the light’. But sometimes the weather just doesn’t play ball; you can be handed a grey, flat day when the sun stays firmly hidden. On days like that, it is all too tempting to burrow back down under the duvet, think ’stuff it’ and not go out.

Who remembers the 1980s marketing slogan “Glasgow’s Miles Better” to encourage tourists to visit and industry to locate there? I used to visit Glasgow fairly frequently in the late 1980s/early 1990s, but hardly since.

One of the best things that has come out of the trips I do is the friendships I have made. And even better when those friendships continue and flourish beyond the trips we sign up to.

My journeys with a camera started with a photo trip to St Kilda, a group of islands off the west coast of Scotland that feel as if they are on the edge of the earth.