Everyday life on the east bank of the Chao Phraya – along Charoen Krung, through Talat Noi, past Song Wat and Chinatown – has held me in its spell for more than a decade.

In the warm climate of Southeast Asia, much of life flows outdoors. People rise with the coolness of dawn and gather again in the late afternoon and evening, when the sun settles and the heat dissipates.

Homes and family businesses blur at the threshold, sharing the same space, the same light, the same breath.

I couldn’t say what this elderly woman and her family sell. But the composition of the room – and the way it was lit – was too compelling not to capture.

Once photography had seduced me – the medium and the tools I use to make images – it changed my life forever. A pact formed between my mind and the camera, and it began to live a life of its own.

My eyes became stereoscopic viewfinders; I am constantly composing, always hunting for angles, perspectives, shapes, colours and contrasts.

It’s an involuntary, subconscious, almost autonomous response that fills every waking moment my eyes are open.

Not always, but mostly, it doesn’t feel like a choice when I take out my camera to catch something that for whatever reason intrigued me.

It’s part muscle memory – and the recurring need to verify (often many hours later, when reviewing what I shot) that the composition I saw with my eyes and in my mind was what I ended up getting.