THE work of Dave Coates is proof that one picture says more than 1,000 words. The stalwart member of Northallerton Camera Club employs only the briefest of captions to summarise facts about the striking colour views in his first two books of photographs devoted to regions he has come to know, love and respect. He leaves the pictures to speak for themselves.

Mr Coates, who served as a North Yorkshire policeman for 30 years and rose to the rank of inspector before he retired, travelled hundreds of miles to capture the beauty of the Yorkshire Dales and the Lake District in their different dresses, seasons and moods.

Although he has joined others in entering the age of the digital camera, the pictures in the books are taken from the vast collection of traditional slides which the award-winning Mr Coates has drawn on for local and regional shows as well as international photographic exhibitions.

Mr Coates, of Northallerton, confessed that he was surprised to be asked to compile the two collections after publishers Myriad Books had seen his web site.

He said: "A chance like this doesn't come calling often in a lifetime, an opportunity to do not one but two books just out of nowhere. At the end of the day, of course, I was flattered to be asked to do them."

The books form part of the Heritage Landscapes series and the Yorkshire Dales volume is divided into five chapters.

It starts at Swaledale in the north, with its narrow valley sides and beautiful meadows, and progresses to Wensleydale with its abbeys, castles and waterfalls, the eye-catching wild flowers of Wharfedale, Malham's dramatic limestone pavements and the three peaks of Pen-y-Ghent, Ingleborough and Whernside, and finally to Crummackdale, famous for its strange limestone rock formations.

The Lake District book, which points out how the topography of the area resembles the spokes of a giant wheel, is divided into ten chapters and takes in the Helvellyn and Scafell mountain ranges, Bassenthwaite, Derwentwater, Borrowdale, Buttermere, Crummockwater, Coniston, Windermere and Ullswater as well as the Langdales, popular with climbers.

Mr Coates's interest in photography, coupled with his love of the outdoors, dates back to his teens, when he first explored the Yorkshire Dales both on foot and by cycle.

The Harrogate-born enthusiast has been a serious photographer for more than 20 years and his work has won awards from the Royal Photographic Society, of which he is an associate member, the Photographic Society of America and the Federation de l'Art Photographique in France. He has won a master's award from the Photographic Alliance of Great Britain.

Mr Coates, who has had pictures published in calendars and magazines, said: "Photography has been in the family for a long time. It began in the First World War, with my father hanging out of a Bristol Fighter taking pictures.

"My brother was keen on photography and I got my first box Brownie in the middle Fifties, followed by my first SLR camera in 1959.

"I was taking photographs while I was a serving policeman and by the time the family had grown up in the Eighties I joined Northallerton Camera Club 20 years ago, but quickly found that I wasn't as good as I thought I was.

"But the sheer enjoyment of sharing photography with other people somehow gave a meaning and a drive to producing better pictures."

He added: "My parents came from Leeds but, being born and bred in Harrogate, I was taken into the Yorkshire Dales from a very early age. About 50 per cent of that book consists of pictures taken last year.

"I have been photographing the Lake District pretty heavily for six or seven years for slide shows and international exhibitions and the cover picture of Ullswater on that book is the one for which I got my first international gold medal. The majority of the award-winning pictures are in the two books."

Mr Coates said patience was often a photographer's greatest virtue in dealing with nature. "I once waited for four and a half hours for a break in the weather at Wastwater and then it was just as if someone had tripped a switch and the sun came out. Waiting is something you have to do quite often.

"You are not so much photographing the landscape as photographing the light as it plays on the land. It's a matter of light composition and colour.

"You just don't take pictures, you are making them. Sometimes you are lucky and it just happens before your eyes."

Mr Coates has won 40 worldwide awards for his work and has had more than 400 photographs accepted for international exhibitions.

The two 128-page hardback books, priced at £16.99 each, are available in local bookshops but condensed versions at £8.99 each have been published for the tourist market.