When I’m out shooting, I tend to make notes on my phone. I’d been waiting for some moment of revelation that tied them all together, but that isn’t going to be happening so it seems, so I’ll just have to leave them as bulletpoints to be woven into something some other time. 

• In addition to the hunter and the farmer, there needs to be the category of the gleaner, following Agnes Varda’s argument that art is a form of gleaning. By this, I mean, creating art from the things one comes across without specifically seeking them. So I go out shooting with a vague idea of what I’m looking for, but usually what I come back with is something entirely different – a reflection in a boggy mire, an abandoned caravan, frost on a path, fly-tipped waste, a stand of pines. Of course, this means coming back with a bit of a mess and endless contradictions. The vast majority of my images will be disregarded, but at some point, a coherence will start to form, and it’s in the editing and sequencing, the thinking through of the images, that things take shape. It’s an immersive, open response to place. It’s how I make films, too. 
• I take various types of shots. These fall into a variety of categories, which I could loosely call: Weird (as in the idiosyncratic and the atmospherically unsettling), archetypal (including objects and vistas), enchanted (a close relative of the picturesque), traces, abstracts, (these two are often pictures of the ground), and the political (sometimes actual things like enclosure banks, sometimes metaphorical). 
• An alternative to the gaze is interpellation – as in projecting one’s ideology onto the world, but as an act of testing out, and an act that is shaped by context, shaping one in turn. 
• Photography is understood popularly as a looking for something rather than just looking. I’m often asked what I’m photographing – once, when I said I was photographing a pylon because I like them, the person asking thought that must be what I photographed generally, as if I was creating some personal catalogue of the things. Last week, I was asked if it was insects. I always say I’m photographing whatever I find. This confuses people. It must be quite a radical approach, I’m thinking. 
• It’s OK taking different types of shots, but really, sometimes they just won’t work together – i.e. vista shots with abstracts. I recall this in books I’ve read – suddently coming across a ‘straight’ photograph of a place, even if there’s a very good reason for it, is often a bit of a disappointment.