Beyond Photography is Katie and John’s first book together and is born out of their own personal experiences and research over the past four years. Katie is a contemporary artist and John is graphic designer. They live in rural England, in an old Edwardian country house. Their experiences are on going.

Synchronicity has been a constant factor in both their lives, even before they met. As kindred spirits they share the quest for truth that occupies all who look beyond the everyday world. They share many interests in common, including: astronomy; archery, reading, walking in the countryside; cartoons and going to the cinema. Between them they have four children and two cats. They love spending time with their family.

The authors and helper.

 

Katie:
“It began with Lights; for John, with appearance of a cloud of small lights in the hall the first week he moved into Brackenbeck. For me, over two hundred miles away, it began with the sudden appearance of strange, tiny twinkling lights in an old haunted cottage.
At that time neither of us was aware of the others existence – but all the decisions we were each making were drawing us together.
What we later termed, ‘Small Transient Lights’, (STLs) led me out of the shadows of my old life, and eventually to Brackenbeck, where our extraordinary experiences with the mysterious luminosities have occurred. This is a special place, and I instantly felt at home in the house and gardens. Even before the coming of all the strange phenomena related in our book, I had began to call one part of the garden, the "Faerie Dell", simply because of the ash tree which grew there in a circle of Alkanet. To me it always felt like an enchanted place; which later proved to be just the case. The tiny, briefly visible lights that I was already familiar with, now began to appear on our photographs as Orbs and Vortices. So began our incredible four year journey into another aspect of Reality..."

We have been fortunate to catch a glimpse of the mystery of life and to share our thoughts and experiences with others. Luminosities and Light-Forms not only gave us the photographs, they provided us an alternative perspective from which to view a larger Reality.

John:
“During the four years of our experiences with the Light-Forms, we seemed at times to be living in two realities at once: we were enchanted by the phenomena we were photographing; its existence had captivated our attention; and yet in the “Real” world it could not have come along at a worse time. We desperately needed to totally concentrate our energies on making a living, and on selling the children’s books we had spent the last three years creating, but instead much of our waking thoughts were now taken up with the mystery of Orbs and Light-Forms. We now had some incredible photos and we just had to try and make sense of it all. We felt almost impelled to write down our experiences. We had to research what was happening here in a wider context and so our book was born! Though to do this took lots of time and made no commercial sense. Besides, we had no clear idea how it would get published; if ever.

When I contacted John Hunt, out of the blue, on another matter, I had no thought of telling him of our experiences; and I didn’t even know that O Books existed. But synchronicity was at work again and our “Orbs” book was destined to be published by a company to whom the circular symbol already had meaning…”

That is, if they have a particular viewpoint; which we are not sure if they do, as they have evidenced both total fascination and complete disinterest with our visiting Orbs and Luminosities.
It became evident quite early on that our cats were not, as some believe of cats in general, pretending to be watching some imaginary thing which is not really there; but were at times actually paying attention to the very Orbs we were busily photographing!

The photograph opposite left just about sums it up: two orbs & two cats - who have of course seen it all before!

For everyone who is cat-friendly, here's a few shots of our three favourite felines:

It wasn't long before we discovered that sometimes cats eyes can often result in orbs of a different kind!

Oscar, as head cat, always has a lot to say, most of which we don't understand, but he perseveres, nevertheless.