Photography and the natural world have been lifelong passions for Ed, shaping his adventures and creative outlook since his early years
In the early 1990s, he also embarked on another path in imaging as a founding member of a small Edinburgh university start-up. As part of a compact academic team, he helped design some of the world’s first digital cameras, creating the silicon chips and image-processing systems that would shape not only the first digital cameras in mobile phones, but also the wider world of consumer and professional digital imaging.
For the next three decades, Ed continued to contribute across industrial and academic engineering R&D, creating and patenting new imaging solutions in fields as varied as medical devices, healthcare, aquaculture, and gaming.
Through it all, photography remained a constant companion. Whether packed in a cabin bag for journeys abroad or carried in a backpack while exploring Scotland’s mountains and glens, a camera was always close at hand.
Ed’s love of travel and adventure has taken him from hill-walking, climbing, and hiking in landscapes across the world to tackling Alpine routes and trekking in the Atlas and Japanese Alps. Rarely leaving long gaps between journeys, he and his wife have shared many of these adventures together — most memorably summiting Kilimanjaro in 2019 and, in 2024, completing the Munros, Scotland’s highest mountains, a long and rewarding journey documented in pictures along the way.
Despite his role in shaping the digital revolution, Ed held on to film photography for many years. He likens it to music: “Streaming is near perfect, perhaps even too clinical. Vinyl, like film, has more character — a lovely medium, even if harder to justify these days.”
