We have just returned from a week of winter sun in Madeira, escaping the chilly temperatures, excessive rain and wind that have characterised the weather in south-east England since the New Year.

I did a number of small photographic projects while in Madeira, and this blog is about one of them. We stayed not far from the centre of Funchal in a working Quinta, surrounded by a banana plantation. Walking into Funchal and going up into the hills around it, I was struck by how practically every square metre of land is used by humans for housing or growing food.

Funchal is built at the base of a high range of hills, and the buildings seem to climb most of the way up it, seemingly higgledy-piggledy and precariously perched one on top of the other. I wanted to give an impression of the intensity of the feeling of human occupation: it is much more concentrated than a single photograph can normally show. I chose to use multiple exposures as my way to express that feeling: quick, hand-held, four exposures, one on top of another, to give an impression of the imprecise, disordered concentration of the area.

All the pictures shown here were taken with my Panasonic Lumix GX9 and the 12-60 mm Panasonic-Leica lens, with multiple exposures done in the camera.