I began drawing with my camera one evening when I was caught up in peak hour traffic on the Pacific Highway and catching sight of the sun as it sank into the horizon began to take photographs through the windscreen of my car.

As I photographed the dying light my exposures got longer and longer until I found myself more excited by what the movement of the camera was doing to the image than the actual subject.

The tail lights of the cars in front of me became as seductive as pots of coloured inks I could dip my fingers into and I found myself increasing the length of my exposures even more so that I had the time I needed to complete my ‘drawings’.

Arriving home and wanting to continue drawing with the camera I began a series of nude studies using the bare bulb of a lamp as my ‘ink’.

Unlike the act of drawing on paper where you can see your line describing the subject as you go, the camera leaves no visible trace in the air as it records the trail of the light – the drawing only visible as a dance your hand makes as it moves the camera, driven by memory and instinct – the freedom and abstraction of the line a direct response to the blind nature of the work and the necessity to put it down fast.

After long hours drawing into the night I found that my body became an extension of the camera, and the drawings a dance my own body was making as I felt my way towards the figure in the dark.

To my mind these images, while technically photographs, are true drawings, the only difference being that my ink was the light of a lamp and my pen was the camera – a digital drawing with all the freedom and difficulty that any drawing poses, with the added pressure of time, and the bonus of the particular and wonderful qualities that the photographic medium can give.