Thank you, I'm still pinching myself! "Engineered Horizons" came out of my love of flying and photographing the land from above. I work from a small aircraft, often over remote parts of Australia, and there's nothing quite like that moment when a place opens up beneath you and turns into pure colour and shape. These salt dams at Useless Loop, in Shark Bay, Western Australia, were exactly that. Flying over them was a dream come true. I just couldn't get over the colours. Soft pinks, blues and greens, all laid out in these big geometric shapes, as if the land had been turned into a painting. I built the series from four of those images, the ones where the colour and the patterns came together best. It's everything I love about aerial work in one place. Colour first, then the shapes and textures, all of it seen from the air.

And I'll tell you the part that still gets me. It's the feeling once an image is finished. I honestly can't believe that “I” created something like this. I never really thought of myself as artistic or creative. I've always seen myself more as a business person. So I'm forever stopping and looking at my own work and going, "I did that!" It's pure amazement, every time. It really is the best feeling in the world.

I'm drawn to colour first. I just love colour and the way it makes me feel. One of my mentors, Dr Les Walkling, actually calls me a colourist, and he's right. Colour is always my first impression. Then come the shapes and the textures, and when they all come together I'm in heaven. So no, there was no clever plan behind any of it. Flying over those salt ponds, I was just completely captivated. The blocks of colour, the sharp lines, all of it from the air. I wasn't thinking "industry", I was just falling in love with what I was seeing. The meaning came later, once I was home looking at the images and realising what these places actually are. You're looking at a heavy industrial site and yet it makes you stop and look, because it's just so beautiful. That's the contrast I love. Finding something beautiful, almost poetic, inside a landscape that people have completely reshaped.

Even though the walls and channels look rigid and permanent, everything inside them is constantly shifting. Those vibrant pinks, mint greens and soft blues aren't painted on. They're alive. They come from microscopic algae, and they depend on how salty the water is, how deep it is, how the light hits it on the day. So the grid might be tough, but the colour itself is so delicate. If the water levels change, or the sun dries it out, that whole beautiful view changes with it. It only exists because of a fine balance between nature and the way people have shaped it.

For me, fragility isn't really about weakness. It's about realising that even something that looks this ordered and permanent can change very quickly. It's a living palette sitting inside a rigid box, never standing still.

In the colours and the edges. Everything's been laid out in neat lines by people, but nature doesn't stay inside them. The colour bleeds from one section into the next, the edges go soft, the salt creeps where it isn't meant to. You can see it right through the images. A pond that's meant to be one colour has gone three or four. We can bulldoze a straight line or build a perfect wall, but the water, the evaporation, the biology, they always push back. People draw the shapes, but the water and the salt do whatever they want. And that's the part I love.

The point just before, every time. When an image goes completely abstract, it just becomes a pattern, and you lose the connection to what it actually is. What I love is the friction in that middle zone, where you can still tell it's a real place, water and salt and earth, but it's starting to look like a painting, and you're honestly not sure which you're looking at. You glance at it, and it reads like a minimalist artwork. Then a second later your brain catches a tiny road, or a channel; the real scale snaps into focus, and you realise it's actually a massive landscape here on Earth. That moment of discovery is one of the things I love most about aerial photography. It lets you see familiar landscapes in completely unfamiliar ways.

I'm not trying to make a political statement. My starting point is always visual and emotional. I want people to feel something first. The words in the description are true. "Extraction" and "intervention" are just the honest reality of how these salt ponds exist, and I'm not going to pretend otherwise. But I'm not pointing a finger at anyone. What fascinates me is that these places are industrial and they're absolutely beautiful, both at the same time, and I don't try to sort that out for you. I just want you to feel what I felt. That mix of "this is stunning" and "this is something we've done to the land." My work is really about quiet observation. My job isn't to tell you what to think, it's to get you to look. If that makes you reflect on our footprint, and the complicated beauty we create along the way, then wonderful. But I'd always rather leave you with a feeling than a lecture. More than anything, I want to share the exhilaration of it all. I feel so grateful to be able to see sights like this, and they always remind me that no matter what's happening in my own life, there's a much bigger picture, and that in the grand scheme of things we're really quite small. I find that very grounding.

So many wonderful people have helped me along the way. Mark Gray, Tony Hewitt, Peter Eastway and Tom Putt have all been part of my journey to be the best I can be, and Mark and Tony in particular have been amazing mentors to me, along with Dr Les Walkling. What I love about them is how generous they are with their knowledge. They're so down to earth, and so talented, and I've learned so much just from being around them.

Beyond that, I'm drawn to anyone who takes a painterly, minimalist approach and challenges the way we look at scale and texture. Artists who can look past the obvious and find a whole new way of seeing something most people would just drive straight past. Edward Burtynsky is a wonderful example; the way he finds such beauty and complexity in landscapes that people have altered. Really, anyone who makes me stop and look again has my attention.

Oh, plenty. I'm always drawn to vast, quiet, isolated places where the earth feels raw and ancient. I'd love to do more aerial work over the rugged expanses of Western Australia. The painterly patterns out there, made by the salt crusts and the tidal movements and that harsh environment, feel like a continuation of everything I loved capturing in *Engineered Horizons*. Further afield, I'd love to fly over Lençóis Maranhenses in Brazil, with those white dunes and the blue and green lagoons in between. That would be a dream from the air. But more than any one place, what excites me now is finding the lesser-known spots. I've photographed so many of the famous locations, so now I'm searching for somewhere just as stunning that hasn't been seen a thousand times before. That's really what keeps me going, the chance of discovering something unexpected. Often the places that end up meaning the most are the ones I knew the least about before I arrived.