IT SEEMS fitting for a dream to start under a full moon. On 21 February 1989 Peter Holmes Sellers found himself unable to sleep and gazing out the window of his Budapest hotel. Across the Danube, alive with shimmering reflections of street lights, was the Royal Palace, illuminated by the moon hovering above it.

Sellers was entranced and started taking photos, and he continued to snap pictures for the rest of the night as the moon moved around the palace and the shadows thinned. And he realised that this was what he wanted to do, to take photographs and reach people through the images.

Five years later he held an exhibition of his photography in the same palace, but that was just part one of the dream coming true.

The hotel room had come courtesy of his then employers at Grand Metropolitan (now Diageo), whom he worked for in international marketing and strategy, but photography had fascinated him since he took it up in school.

"It was always a dream to do something with photography but I wasn't brave enough to begin with, " explains Sellers. "So, much later, I found myself in eastern Europe and I was just really moved by the palpable beauty of Budapest and Hungary and the people there. As a child I always had a dream of making a magical book but was never sure of the when or how. And I thought I could take pictures of this beautiful and relatively unknown place and at the same time I could make my dream come true of being a photographer."

The product of the labour of love that was started that night 17 years ago is The Magic of Light, described as "a photographic fable". The phrase fits nicely. The book contains over 200 photographs taken in Ireland, Hungary and various cities and countries across Europe interspersed with words and quotations; Sellers' gift is to give instinctive and beautiful composition to the fleeting moments he captures.

"The only way to define yourself as a photographer is to trust your own vision, " he explains.

"Nearly all my photographs are intuitive, where I don't plan them, just feel them more than anything, trying to capture beauty and energy and pass them on through the colours. Henri Cartier-Bresson was a great hero of mine and he was famous for his 'decisive moment', where everything comes together in a split second and you capture it."

It took significantly longer than that to pull the various stands and big themes of the book together, like a giant jigsaw puzzle with Sellers gradually realising where the pieces should go.

The book stresses his optimism about the start of a new millennium, a new dawn, but emphasises the need to bridge the gap between the masculine and feminine worlds, and the gift of being able to look at the world with a childlike wonder. Sellers' own writings are aided and abetted by quotations drawn from a refreshingly wide-ranging group of sources, with Paulo Coelho (a signed-up fan of Sellers' work) sitting side-by-side with signs from fastfood restaurants and nuggets of wisdom procured from strangers met on his travels.

One odd reference point in the book is the Italian electronic music composer Robert Miles, who had a worldwide hit back in 1996 with the dance track 'Children'. "I remember being moved by the video at the time, a child looking out a car window. It's this idea of both moving forward and seeing the world as a child. The importance of travel and experience, but mainly about how impressionistic children are and how they soak up everything they see and hear, " says Sellers.

"One of the themes of the book is seeing the world with fresh eyes, or with the eyes of a child, and how easy it is for children's vision to be mixed up if they are given the wrong impressions or role models. It's this idea that children see the world as it is.

They see the magic of the world and because the rest of us are older and more cynical they can remind us how magical it can be."

Indeed, one of The Magic of Light's particularly whimsical touches is the almost childlike endeavour of cloud photos, capturing figures that appear in swirling clouds. "Shapes in the clouds resonate with people - it's like a connection between heaven and earth. Children from the beginning of time would have looked up and thought 'that looks like a fish', or a dinosaur or whatever. A girl I met in New York once gave me the quotation that Leonardo Da Vinci said he saw 'all of life passing by in infinite shapes in the clouds' so that kind of gave me the confidence to keep on taking cloud photos. If it's good enough for Da Vinci. . ."

Sellers currently works as a freelance creative director for Fragrances of Ireland and clearly takes great pride in stirring a reaction in people, be it visually or olfactorily. "The important thing is to be aware of the beauty in the world and to be aware of other people and of what's important. And art can perform an important role there in terms of opening people's eyes or reminding them what they know already, showing beauty, uplifting people, and perhaps reminding them about the point of life without being preachy.

"It's interesting the way that artists down through the years have endured and it's always part of children's education to look at art and learn the wisdom and messages of previous times, in the same way that great stories do the same thing. They encrypt and carry information that is important lest we forget it. The role of the artist is to keep people aware and moving forward."