About Me

I work full time supporting SEN Students in Secondary Education in England. It’s one of those proper crazy jobs, if I told you about it you wouldn’t believe me. A few years back an opportunity arose to support SEN students taking Photography at GCSE. This was the turning point!
I learnt as the students did, much of the time from them. Their enthusiasm encouraged me to pick up a camera, for which I will always be grateful.
Along the way I found myself attracted to the many qualities of black and white photography. Stripped of colour another reality reveals itself. There’s an emotional pull that appeals and excites me.
It’s now many years since I worked with my first photography students. Every GCSE passed is a source of great pride. It continues to be a huge privilege supporting young people in photography.

There came a point, when I was confident enough, to want to show my work online. Get a website I thought, easy-peasy I thought. Darn! there was a photographer out there with the same name as me with a self-named website.
So rather than use my own name, which is how everyone else does it, I came up with the name ‘Pixeloptica’ for my website. Don’t ask me why, I wanted something different and it was short and easy to remember. Time will tell if ‘not doing what everyone else does’ was a good idea or not.

Along the way I’ve discover the dubious pleasures of building my online presence here. The tendency towards OCD and unlimited ways to tinker are not a good combination. Not if you have limited time that is.
Many of the photographs you see here were taken using my iPhone 7. I’m using it more and more and find it so convenient. I occasionally use a now discontinued Nikon D3300 and more frequently a Sony RX100 II.

I’m on the usual social media ‘platforms’ so, if you are too, it would be great if you could pop along and say “hello”!

You can get in touch via the form on my Contact page.
Prefer email:   mark@pixelverse.co.uk