ALTHOUGH, as Penzance-based photographer David Carley says, Cornwall possesses all the detail and vastness his creativity requires, he acknowledges that it is still good to sometimes step outside the county's boundaries and to look at what other places have to offer.

With the 14 photographs that make up his second solo show at Penzance Arts Club, he looks, in fact, at two places in which he has lived and worked, Europe and the USA.

A self-taught photographer who only returned two and a half years ago to this part of the world where, when he is not using his camera he manages and markets websites to perform well in search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing, he spent some 18 years away, based in Sheffield and working throughout Europe and in New York.

Roaming far from the beaten track in the Czech Republic, for instance, provided him with the inspiration for Beneath Pravcicka Brana, one of a number of black and white compositions with eerie overtones taken, as he says, "when the early morning mist conjured up a glorious sombreness you could normally only wish for – the rock structures were so fantastic they hardly seemed real but imagined". These are offset with those in which his sense of humour takes over, the juxtaposition of a bright red Ceska Kamenice Skoda against that of a Czech Tractor in what he calls "a little collection of beautiful vehicles".

Whether looking up at the sky or down from the heavens in New York, he maintains the impression is always the same – "exhilarating" – and it is an exhilaration which he captures and conveys in his shots of the skyscrapers and traffic in Manhattan. Fifth Avenue Taxis conjures up a whole sense of adventure, not to mention memories of all the "follow that cab" movies one has ever seen set in New York, while Manhattan Skyscape threatens to give the viewer the crick in the neck that all first time visitors to the city are likely to get.

He confesses that when standing atop of La Grande Arche de la Defense he got the same feeling as he did when approaching Mont Blanc, that of suspense and vastness which took him back to Cornwall where, as he adds, his Cornish Cedar Landscape portrays a side to Cornwall which makes the photographer sharpen his lens: "The huge busy sky doesn't necessarily depict the coming of a storm, but the clearing of heavy clouds."

Then, too, there is the superb Magnolia Tree, photographed in Morrab Gardens against a glorious blue Cornish sky, a study in which its pink buds could be butterflies, not forgetting Clematis Study which depicts almost every grain of the stamen and petals as they move together in chorus.

One who has been described as a believer in the power of intricate detail the photographs David Carley is showing in "An Inspiration" are as intriguing and inviting as they are intricate.

Admissions is free to the general public and club members alike, and they are on view in Penzance Arts Club, Chapel Street, 11am-6pm Monday-Saturday, until October 2.