Argentinian Patagonia is beautiful – it excelled my wildest perceptions in both beauty and wildlife. The environment – hundreds and hundreds of miles of flat land, for the most part – concluded in the city of Ushuaia and the Tierra Del Fuego National Park. Ushuaia felt like some weird Lynchean mixture of a Russian prison town and a Scottish fishing village and I could happily have spent a year there.

For me, the most interesting thing about Patagonia, which becomes amplified the further south you travel, is the state of mind it elicits and refines: one of contemplation, raw study and a cleansing zen. It’s very difficult to describe but very conducive to the act of photography.

I have hundreds of photographs from my months in Patagonia and have recently been looking through several taken around Playa Larga, a stretch of beach and coastal road along the Beagle Channel. Much of the day there was spending climbing up a steep cliff from the beach, through a forest where hundreds of birds had made their homes, desperately trying to get a shot of them in flight. When I take pictures of birds, I’m interested in their shape and form more than, say colour or environment – thus, I tend to get a lot of shots against the sky.