It's a funny thing, faith. It asks you to park reason up a side street and wander the streets looking for meaning. Maybe there is meaning, but there again, maybe there is just an infinite greyscale of uncertainty. Or maybe there is just an old photo of Cross Rhodes Street in Halifax.

My Lightroom Catalogue currently has 105,369 photographs I have taken stored on it. A quick calculation suggests that is in the region of 1,368 and a half photos a year, which is a fair old number. ....

The image is taken from an old picture postcard from my collection, and it is a scene that most Halifax folk will be familiar with. The water fountain was presented to the town in 1869 by the temperance campaigner, Joseph Thorp. Carved on it is the slogan, "Water Is Best". ...

I've spent a fair amount of my life taking phots, and whenever I am tempted to question whether I would have been better off doing something else, I look at photos like this one. It's not a great photo; it's badly cropped and full of distracting shadows. But it's my father, and it's priceless.

Given enough time, even the most inconsequential images acquire value from a social and historical perspective. Walking under Halifax's North Bridge over half a century ago, I was taken by the hanging measuring bar on the old railway sheds. ....

Every picture tells a story, but very often, half a picture tells even more of the story. The picture tells the story of that moment in time when the shutter fired - the family gathered on the doorstep. I have no idea who they are - the photograph was part of a batch of unwanted memories. ...

The industrial north has always excelled when it comes to contrasts: dark and light, green and grey, smoky chimneys and graceful statues. This photograph of mine is from the 1970s and shows the back of the Britannia Building, which stands at one end of Elland Bridge. ....

Looking back at my life, I must say that there have not been all that many times when I have been happier than when I was sitting in a pub. It isn't easy to analyse the attraction: it's not necessarily the drink - I'm quite happy to let a single pint share my evening with me -

Enough of all this modern stuff, with seagulls screaming and tall ships leaving. It's back home and back in time, back forty or more years, back to a Halifax in transition. Carpets had gone but commerce hadn't arrived, the chimneys were smokeless, but the trees hadn't grown. ...

It's not the leaving of Liverpool that grieves me, But the thought I might not be home in time for tea

The building in the background is the rather magnificent former Birkenhead Town Hall. The bird in the foreground is a seagull who told me his name was Stanley. The photographer was simply a visitor to Birkenhead.

When I was a little lad we would come to New Brighton on holiday. We would get the train to Liverpool and then take the Mersey ferry "across the water". Very often, that ferry would be the Royal Daffodil. …

Going To Liverpool today. I was there this time last year. Here's one I took then.

I bought a collection of old documents on eBay the other day, and amongst them was a share certificate from the South Lancashire Land Company. It was issued in 1873 and, as far as I can see, has never been cancelled. It would therefore appear that I own a bit of South Lancashire. ...

I've always called this photograph "Street In Brighouse" because I have never been quite sure which street it was. I'm pretty certain it was Brighouse - the rest of the photographs on the same strip of negatives were certainly in and around Brighouse. ....

This was taken in London more than half a century ago. My future wife was living in North London at the time, and I would make my way there from the station, as always, taking pictures as I walked. ...

This is a photograph from at least sixty years ago, taken outside the Withens Hotel in Wainstalls, Halifax. The building is no longer a pub; it was converted into a private residence shortly after being gutted by fire in 2001. ...

I seem to have quite a collection of photographs of my desktop. Back in ancient times, these would be means of using up the last frame or two of a film before developing it. These days, it is the result of pressing combinations of keys on a computer keyboard by mistake. .....

As I drive into Brighouse later today and glance down at the River Calder from Bradford Road Bridge, I will be checking the river levels rather than the aesthetics of the view. Perhaps, however, I should take a moment to compare the current scene with this photo I took almost 60 years ago....

All photographers have their favourite subjects. With some, it's wild animals; with some, it is beautiful women; some like railway engines, others like mountains. As far as I am concerned, you can't beat a fish and chip shop. Here is a particularly fine example I came across in Southwold recently.

These days, geotags are automatically added to smartphone photos along with the date and the time (and the temperature and your hat size and the state of your bank balance, more than likely). ....

Melange Printing is defined as the printing of textile fibres with bands of colour alternating with unprinted areas. This is one of my old photographs taken from North Bridge in Halifax, which shows Fletchers' mill. Fletchers were specialists in melange printing. ....

I had a funny thought the other day whilst enjoying a lunchtime pint. Wouldn't it be odd if, after we were born, time went in reverse? Given that I was born in 1948, that would mean it was now 1871! The Franco-Prussian War is just ending, Chicago is on fire and chewing gum is just being invented.

I've always admired the way that builders of mills and factories in these parts were never put off by an inconvenient hill. Industrial workplaces were often almost superglued to the sides of valleys - like Crawford-Swifts on Claremount Road, Halifax in this photo of mine from 35 years ago. ...

My brother sent this photograph to me the other day - in my role as "the Burnett family historian" - suggesting it was either me or him. I tried doing a facial recognition analysis based on the rest of my family photos and it suggested it was a young Aunty Miriam (which it clearly isn't). ...

Someone asked me the other day whether I had any photos of the Daily Tailors shop in Halifax - and going through my archives, I discovered I had one - or at least half of one (think of it as a photographic sports jacket rather than a suit). .....

If someone had undertaken a proper cost-benefit analysis of the construction of the Settle to Carlisle railway line, it would probably have never been built. ...

There is something slightly Mona Lisa-ish about this Victorian portrait of an unknown woman. Her eyes follow you like a stalker, and her smile is enigmatic enough for a codebreaker. The Mona Lisa is, of course, priceless and is said to have an insurance value of over a billion dollars. ...

Halifax as it was sixty years ago. If you compare and contrast it with Halifax as it is today, you will find that most of the structures are still in place - but the shops have changed, the signs have changed, the cars have changed, and you can no longer wait for 30 minutes....

The beautiful Burne-Jones stained glass window I featured the other day were originally to be found in St James's Church, which stood on Bradford Road in Brighouse (between Tesco and Wellholme Park, where the St James Court flats are today). ....

I must have taken this photograph of the Jessop Hospital in Sheffield sometime around the late eighties. We were living in Sheffield at the time. Perhaps it was November 1989: I can certainly recall pacing around the Jessop Hospital, waiting for my son to be born. ...

I visit this lady as often as I can. She is from Brighouse, but now lives in the delightful Cliffe Castle Museum in Keighley. She was created by the great Victorian Pre-Raphaelite painter, Sir Edward Burne-Jones, for St James's Church in Brighouse ....

Back in the 1950s, there was a school geography textbook which, in the section on urban geography, had a picture of Halifax, and pupils were encouraged to count the number of mill chimneys. ....

A pigeon on the top of a post. The Lake District, last week. It's pigeon post.

You don't need to know the time, the place or the names of the subjects to enjoy a good photograph. A degree of anonymity can, in fact, help; you can throw yourself into the scene and construct backstories and front stories to your heart's content. ...

If you follow Howes Lane from Northowram to the point when it overlooks the Shibden Valley, you can get wonderful views across that valley towards Halifax. ....

I took this photograph at the end of last week, before the rains came, but even after endless weeks of near drought, the essential greenness prevails. This is not the England of red crosses paint-smeared on public buildings, but a place of balanced mellowness - a green and pleasant land indeed.

Market stalls in Brighouse in the 1960s. Other than the little girl (who is probably just about to become a pensioner!) you can't see any faces. You don't need to. Your mind automatically fills in the missing detail. The faces lined by years of work. The complexions scarred by too much worry.

This photograph was part of a collection of family photos. The only clue as to the subject is a date stamped on the back, 6th January 1929, and the name of the studio where it was taken, Jerome. Could it be my mother? ....

This is one of my favourite photographs from my walks around Halifax 55 years ago. When I took it, did I think I was capturing a world that was vanishing - a world of cobbled streets, gas lights and soot-stained stone terraces -

My visit to the Lake District concludes with this rather wonderful photograph of my Auntie Miriam taken on a boat there ninety or so years ago. Whilst Miriam's smile is, as always, engaging, my attention is immediately captured by the passenger in the rather wonderful hat.

I took this photograph in the Lake District more than forty years ago. How the bench came to be in the lake I cannot remember, but it was too good a photographic opportunity to miss, so I persuaded my wife and a friend to get their feet wet. …

The Halifax Charity Gala parade some sixty years ago. There was a lack of sophistication and a fair amount of amateurishness in terms of costume design, but they are fun to look back at now. ...

I have a very large box of unsorted, unwanted, and undocumented photographs which sits on my desk, and yesterday I dipped into it to get a photo so that I could check the connection between my scanner and my new computer. ...

Holmfield Mill in Halifax - a photograph I must have taken in the late 1960s or early 70s. I had a summer job there at about that time, working as a "bobbin-ligger" - collecting used bobbins from around the mill and stacking them in pointless piles.

I am migrating programmes and files from my old computer to my new one, a process which, in terms of stress levels, is equivalent to moving house. Whilst waiting for a lengthy download to take effect, I started messing with an image file and ended up with this rather nice picture -

The colour isn't particularly real - I must have added it at some stage in the fifty or so years since I took the original photograph. We tend, however, to think of Halifax back in the '60s and '70s in terms of black and white, forgetting that the mill-ponds could occasionally reflect blue skies.

In 1840, Matlock mill-owner John Smedley turned his back on "a life of excessive indulgence" and dedicated himself to religion and hydrotherapy. His original treatment rooms were replaced in the 1880s by this magnificent establishment, which continued to serve as an Hydro until the 1950s ....

I thought a novel way of displaying this unique and priceless diamond necklace was to place it on top of a bush in our front garden. As I suspected, the beauty of the diamonds is perfectly offset by the raw simplicity of the foliage. Nature could never create anything as spectacular as this!

This is a photograph of Bradford Road in Brighouse that I took back in the 1960s (back in the days when camera shutter speeds were too slow to freeze a passing wagon)....