“To me, photography is an art of observation.  It’s about finding something interesting in an ordinary place… I’ve found it has little to do with the things you see and everything to do with the way you see them.” – Elliott Erwitt.

It is 6:30 in the morning, it is March, and the air temperature is hovering around zero.  I am swimming, without a wetsuit, off the coast of Brighton, and I am lost in a sea of colour and form.  It is utterly mesmeric and I am transfixed; I am not moving, just observing, and slowly my body starts shutting down.  I am saved from my reverie by my swimming buddy, the carpenter.  And so this story begins.

I have been shooting the water ever since, striving to do justice to nature’s motifs.  I’ve always been fascinated by reflections and the way they play with the world around us, subjugating form and providing visual delight; but since I started photographing these series of images, I’ve discovered worlds within worlds.  As the elements collide, reality seems to shift somewhat, as if through this natural conflict we have reached different planes, where nature’s abstract artists are at work.

My images work in two ways; from afar, they pique your interest, they intrigue your eyes and your mind as they tap into the ideal of soft fascination.  However, when you draw nearer, the aesthetic engagement changes, they become something different entirely; the minutiae, the kaleidoscopic detail, the frequencies, the sheer genius of nature explodes out of the image. ***

The series – “the unorganised, the immeasurable, the eternal” – can be viewed here.

My aim with this series, as Gustav so memorably said, was to try and capture the moment when, “nature herself shivers with ecstasy”.

All the images found on this website are sold as limited editions.  There will be 9 prints (+3 AP’s) per image.

If you are a commercial client and you like a specific style, I do have other images that I would be happy to release as open editions, so if that is the case, please do get in touch.

***  One can click through on the images here, to see them as large as possible on a screen, and one get a flavour of the imagery, but for obvious reasons they are low res.  My work is best viewed in high res, at scale, on the finest photographic paper, whilst using Giclée printing.  As ever, the gods and the devils are in the detail…

Tomos Ifans