My name is Alister Hayes and I live and work in North Edinburgh as an art, design and photography teacher. I have made photographs almost continuously since I was a boy. For most of my life I have made them without thinking about them much or trying to properly understand what I was doing. At college I took a short course in black and white film photography, developing and printing, which led me to fall in love with that process. I used this type of photography mostly as a starting point in an art making process that led to films, installations, and ideas that went nowhere or stayed in my head. Post college, my camera was something I would pick up to document trips, holidays, new places, events etc. It was a personal record, almost none of which has been printed and much of which has been lost over the years, left in old houses, boxes of negatives, abandoned hard-drives and defunct online spaces. It has been a combination of my work as a teacher and Covid lockdowns that have started me on a journey to try and make something more meaningful and interesting using photography. As often as I can, I will grab a camera and head out into my local area to try and find interesting images. Sometimes I find some.