All the pictures which appear on our rotating header are our own “home-made” photographic moments.
We hope you may enjoy the diversity, including the way we have set it to change each time a page is loaded or reloaded. However, we have also provided in most headers parts of a picture Simon took at a lake in Switzerland in 2010 as an anchor.
The pictures we have selected are chosen to showcase random examples of the variety of interacting, dynamic, complex, informational, natural, open living systems all around and including humans: the grand arena of inter-connected life of which we all form part. . .
If any readers would like to contribute a proposed home-made photograph for one of our headers, with a living systems theme, then by all means get in touch and we will be happy to consider your work. If we like it, you’ll get to see it featured as one of the rotating headers on this website! We’ll also credit you for your work on this page. To give a random example, one reader has already suggested that we could take an artistic shot of pine cone(s), against a forest backdrop, but we have yet to take the shot. But don’t restrict yourself to pine cones: If you’re feeling imaginative, the sky’s the limit, and even that may not be the limit if you take your camera flying with you!
Simon has assembled some further random pictures of his own on flickr here for anyone who is curious to see more and enjoys the visual medium!
Note from Simon: From time to time I hope to add new selections from my travels, although it’s only an occasional hobby. We also like being able to add some of our own visuals to this website. My photographic style (rather against the tide, I might add!) is that I do my best to emphasize or at least aspire to old-fashioned skills of photographic composition, and so I intentionally try to AVOID touching up photos as much as I can. I limit myself to basics such as very occasional cropping, and that’s about it. My grandfather pursued photography as a hobby back in the days when hours would be spent labouring over a few compositions. Now for many people it’s more a case of fast-on-the-trigger and let’s compensate later. . . So sometimes it seems that touching up digital photographs has become a widespread trend which is not only in many cases covering up inherent weaknesses in the original compositions, but which also leads to a degradation of artistic authenticity, generally speaking. . . although naturally, such generalizations don’t always apply! Just because this is my personal style doesn’t mean that more sophisticated digital work from others may not bring good results in a different way. . .
To draw a musical example, one of the reasons I enjoy the Beatles’ last album, ‘Let It Be,’ the most of any of their many excellent albums is that it is perhaps the least polished, with a feeling of authentic music-making running through the songs. Some of the songs were recorded live in an impromptu fashion on the roof of Abbey Road studios, with the ‘lads’ larking around in between songs, and the music really shines as a result. As such, if my pictures look like they’re wearing less make-up and jewellery compared to the norm, then I will rest easy 
