HAVING lived most of his life in York, John Potter thought he knew the Yorkshire Dales well.

On top of his day job as a design technology teacher at York's Manor Church of England School, John is also an award-winning landscape photographer. He had photographed the Dales many times - in fact, it was partly his portfolio of pictures posted on the internet that caught the eye of publishers Myriad Books.

When they asked him to take the photographs and write the words for a new book about the Dales, however, he began to realise he didn't know the national park half as well as he thought he did.

For 11 months he was out in his spare time in almost all weathers.

"I really immersed myself in the area," he says. "I was looking for all sorts of new angles, new locations. I revisited lots of locations I had been to before and found new vantage points. As a photographer you're constantly looking for new locations from which to take good photos in good light."

The result is Yorkshire Dales Villages - a glossy, 96-page photographic guide to the Dales. There are plenty of stunning landscape portraits here - but as the book's title implies, John has also been at pains to capture village life in the area. There are photographs of the Masham Steam Engine and Fair Organ rally, for example; children dancing round a maypole at West Burton; and tourists at the market place in pretty Grassington.

Among the photos he is most proud of is one of a young motorcyclist taking part in an annual trial at Halton Gill, poised as if apparently about to leap down the mountainside. He's also pleased with his image of fell runners racing up Buckden Pike. It was August, he says - one of the biggest days of the year for local people, their gala day. Unfortunately, it was raining.

He climbed the Pike to get above the runners then snapped them as they came up. "I was up there in the rain," he laughs. "You have to be there and you have to be ready, because they come up very quickly."

Despite the power of such images, however, you get the sense that it is the Dales landscape with which John is most comfortable.

"It is quite unique," he says. "The valleys, the dry stone walls, the waterfalls. It is very special."

One of the things he most loves about that landscape is the way the stone walls that thread across the hills pick out the contours of the land. For a photographer, often the best light in which to photograph the Dales is early morning or late afternoon, when the sunlight slants across the hills from the side.

His favourite photograph in the book is one showing Littondale and Wharfedale from Hill Castles Scar which is a perfect example of the way "side light' emphasises the sweeping contours.

It is the sky he particularly loves about this photograph. "It was a windy day, and this weather system was blowing across the Dales," he recalls. "The sky is fantastic."

Another of his favourite landscape photos is that of Hardraw Force. A thin trickle of water drips down the dank side of a cliff face to splash into the stream below. It looks oddly bleak and cheerless - and if you look carefully you can see that where the water splashes down, it has frozen into a mound of ice.

This was a photo he had taken earlier, John says. It was a bitterly cold day - the last day of the millennium, in fact, December 31, 1999. "It was extremely cold, and difficult to get down to the waterfall. It was very slippery and icy. But what struck me was this huge ice-ball under the waterfall itself."

John has the York camera Club to thank for his passion for photography. He joined the club in 1983, and has never looked back. Now, more than 20 years later - and after 23 years as a teacher - he is about to take the plunge and go into photography full-time.

The 54-year-old will be 'retiring' from Manor School at the end of this term and is already working on his next two books - one of the North York Moors and Yorkshire Coast, and one of East Anglia.

He won't be saying goodbye to teaching altogether, however - he plans to teach night classes on digital photography at Askham Bryan College. And so just possibly hel to inspire the next generation of talented Yorkshire photographers.

Updated: 11:37 Saturday, June 18, 2005