Red sky at night is a photographer's delight

When you live and breathe photography, work long hours as a photojournalist, it's sometimes easy to forget that photography was once just a hobby, albeit a passionate one.

You find that it feels like forever since you took any pictures just for the sheer pleasure of it, excluding taking photos of family and so on. Even while on holiday, including my honeymoon, I found myself thinking of pictures that could be of benefit to publishers somewhere.

Last weekend was different. Having a close friend and fellow photographer from Israel over for a short vacation, I found myself playing tourist at home.

One of the things we did was take a harbour cruise. Naturally, I took some basic kit with me, just planning on doing some happy snaps along the way.

We took an afternoon cruise, and the quality of the evening light was magnificent. We witnessed one of the most spectacular sunsets I can recall in a long time. At dusk, the sky took on beautiful hues of red, orange, pink and mauve, all reflected on the water.

This, to me, was a time to enjoy photography for its own sake, with little thought of what the resulting images might be used for. I played with colour, shape, texture, light and shadow.

The thing is, a couple of days later, with the incident at the Marsa Power Station, I was digging out images I'd shot of the plant as the sun set behind it, and when the editor saw the rest of the images I'd shot, he asked me to write this piece. So once again, unwittingly, it seemed to turn out that I'd been working along.

The pure hobby would have to wait for another day.