DIANE Barker is probably the sort of person a lot of us would like to be, but have never quite dared take the risk. Going to faraway places, meeting fascinating people and making the experiences count.

On several occasions in the past we have catalogued the extraordinary life and times of this photographer/writer, who grew up in a Worcestershire village pub but found her spiritual home nearly 5,000 miles away in Tibet, and here comes the latest chapter of her story.

Because Portraits of Tibet has just hit the bookshelves and while at £30 a pop it’s not budget, it does contain 108 superb images of people and places Diane captured in the high country that straddles the roof of the world.

It’s a long way from Alfrick, not far from Malvern in the Teme Valley, where father John was the legendary landlord of The Swan Inn, but it’s a land Diane has come to love and she has been taking photographs there for almost 30 years.

“My interest in photography began during childhood,” she explained. “Mum was always an enthusiastic recorder of family life and there were lots of albums, old tins full of photos and some very old snapshot cameras around the house, bringing with them a natural feeling for recording things for fun. In my teens an Instamatic camera was bought for me. I tried out slide films and fell in love with that luminous medium.

“Later as a young hippy nomad travelling around America in a VW campervan, I discovered among other photographers, the work of Edward S. Curtis, noted for documenting the lives of Native Americans.

“He became a hero but his photos also evoked a tremendous sadness that the beautiful way of life he had lovingly, and sometimes controversially, recorded seemed to have disappeared.”

Initially Diane focussed on painting, usually watercolours, and used photographs mainly as a reference tool, but then in 1979 she  bought her first quality camera, albeit second hand, a Nikon FM and it’s been a trusty friend ever since.

She added: “In my late thirties, travel to India started to become very compelling, answering my need for adventure and freedom, and to become closer to a land so much more mysterious, colourful, and inspiring than where I was from. I began documenting my travels there,  initially just for myself.

“For a while I had a Buddhist boyfriend who was teaching English to Tibetan monks in Sikkim, and while visiting him for several months I became fascinated by

the Tibetan community and started to photograph them. In the early 1990s, on the spur of the moment, I approached a small photo library and to my astonishment they accepted some of my photographs with a lot of friendly encouragement. Photography started to overlap with painting then, and would take over naturally.

“To be inspired to take photographs I have to feel a real love for my subject, and I certainly fell in love with the landscape of Tibet and its people, who have been the main focus of my photographic work since around 1994.”

The kickstart occurred one day as Diane was travelling with some locals on the Changthang plateau. “After hours of driving we left the road and cruised across trackless high-altitude desert scattered with quartz and herbs,” she said.

“We eventually crested a rise and saw in the distance a salt-lake with a white Tibetan picnic tent pitched beside it and horses nearby.

“Out of it emerged these glorious, wild and earthy men with long hair, earrings, home-spun clothes and felt boots. It was like a revelation, a bolt out of nowhere. These were Tibetan nomads, probably originally from Ngari in western Tibet.

"I realised that here a beautiful indigenous, earth based, culture was still alive and intact and I was deeply struck by an extraordinary sense of their connection with the environment around them that I had never encountered before.

“I have found Tibetans to be some of the most open, generous, and humorous people I’ve ever met.  It is impossible for me to pinpoint why I was so drawn to these people and their land, but it has something to do with the vast skies, the way the mountains and valleys seemed to sparkle with magic, and the great open-heartedness I found there.”

And no, after all these years, she still doesn’t speak Tibetan.