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For John, who is based in Hebden Bridge, the important thing for a photographer is "to see the best of it and try and find places that haven't been photographed before. You fall on things by chance just by wandering around."

From high up on Haworth Moor to Centenary Square on a sunny day, collecting images for his new book has taken him all over Bradford. He says: "It probably wasn’t the best time to do Bradford since the centre is being dug up but I suppose there’s never a good time to do a city because there's always a lot of work going on. I enjoyed doing it but that’s because I took Bradford the borough, rather than Bradford the city, and I got out as far as Ilkley and Keighley and other places like that."

'It's amazing the packhorse trail is still there.'

The Shipley Glen tramway is one of John's favourite places: "My dad used to take me there as a kid and it's got a really old-fashioned feel to it – it feels Edwardian even now. It’s as if nothing has changed. But I’m not that discriminating. I walk around and just try and find pictures in the back streets, in the parks, in the mill areas, Little Germany, statues and people wandering about. I try and make something out of whatever I see.

"I’m always photographing in my head so there’s always a camera in the car. I’m sure everyone sees everything differently. I look at patterns and colours and shapes of things and I don’t know how many people think like that."

The Shipley Glen tram

He has his own views about how the centre of Bradford could be improved: "I would love to see the centre of Bradford as a lake because it’s nearly there already I think - just knock the police station down and turn the taps on. I don’t think they’ll ever do it - I think they’ll end up with some awful shopping centre but it’s a wonderful opportunity. There’s nothing in the centre of Bradford you wouldn’t mind knocking down except for the Town Hall."

John also works as a writer. Of his 50 or so published books only 12 are photo collections. He says: "I write comedy and guide books. All the time I’ve been trying very hard to keep the jokes out of the books I’ve had to do because the editors always scrap them. In the comedy books I can keep the jokes in...I’m writing a book at the moment about the Yorkshire character, the whole mythology about it. I’ve called it The Whippets Have Eaten All The Pigeons. It’s a debunking of all these ridiculous Yorkshire myths because I think they are very patronising.”

'It's simple arrangements...'

Not surprisingly John, despite living in Hebden Bridge, does not want to be seen as a Yorkshire writer: "I just loathe the professional Yorkshiremen and I’m trying to take them down a peg or two."

Last year John published another volume of West Yorkshire photographs, Moods of the Bronte Moors. He says: "The funny thing about the South Pennines is that if you look on the map it’s nearly all countryside but if you go by car it’s nearly all urban. You can stand on the top of Woodhead Moor and there’s nothing to see, there are no houses, no cars, no roads, no nothing and yet when you’re in the valley bottoms you are into a really urban environment so that’s the strange thing about the area...From where I live, Hebden Bridge, you can walk out and there’s no suburbs – you simply walk out at the end of a terraced street and you are into the fields. You have town and country together."

John captures his images of West Yorkshire using a 35mm with three lenses. He says: "Film is as good as it’s ever going to be, you’ve got 150 years of development and digital is not there yet but I shall probably have to change or give it up and carry on writing. They haven’t changed the words."

But, for John, successful photography has nothing to do with format: "To me it’s all about light. Without getting too pretentious what you are capturing is light so a lot of the pictures are just plays of light on the landscape."

(John Morrison's A Portrait of Bradford is published by Halsgrove)