Nearly every morning at around half past four - when I am home and not travelling on assignment - I slip out the door of our house here in Sussex and set out on a bicycle ride. Typically I go for about thirty miles, but this can vary depending on mood, winds and weather. I ride this for pleasure alone, not to get fit, lose weight or (god forbid) train for a race, but because I love the jaunty freedom of being out and about on my bicycle, especially during these cool, silent pre-dawn hours when all the rest of the world is asleep. 

As you do with music, I vary my rides to suit my frame of mind - sometimes I head up into the hilly Sussex weald, and ride along narrow winding sunken lanes, some of them so leafy and deep in shade that you want a headlamp even in daytime; other times I set off across the coastal marshes on a road flanked by reeds and water courses; still other times I'll be in a nostalgic mood and decide to pedal along the promenades of the faded old seaside holiday towns that dot this stretch of the Sussex coast with their echoes of summers past.

By the time I return to the house, an hour or two later, having witnessed the sunrise and put however many miles of town and country beneath my wheels, I feel as though I have been places, seen things, travelled in the grand old sense of the word. Indeed I often return home with a greater sense of having travelled than I get from hopping on a wide-bodied jet and flying halfway across the globe on an assignment. As a travel photographer it occurred to me that perhaps I ought to start bringing along my camera and treat these morning jaunts as self-assigned travel stories. And so I did, along with a travel tripod and a remote shutter release that allows me to capture images of myself on the road. 

And what a joy that turned out to be - the twin pleasures of celebrating the simple freedom and beauty of a bicycle ride and seeing with new eyes the old familiar work-a-day world that lies within a twelve-mile radius of my home. Herewith a grab-bag sampler of eighteen images taken on my morning rides. In every image I am both the photographer and the subject - an art that has taken me much time and patience to master.  As a final note I would add that while I may be the "model" in these photos, these are not 'selfies'; they are not meant to be about me as an individual, but to depict A Cyclist in the landscape.  I hope you see some you like. Roff Smith