SANDI Thom may once have wished to be a punk rocker, in the words of her number one hit, but she never envisaged a new career path as a photographer.

Then came the invitation from Nunnington Hall, the National Trust country house that has already given over its walls to photographic shows by Thom’s fellow rock musicians Graham Nash, Bryan Adams and The Police guitarist Andy Summers.

And so the Scottish troubadour is showing her camera work in public for the first time this summer: 40 works or more of the people she has encountered and places she has visited on her travels as a musician, plus a sprinkling of self-portraits.

Such images tend to be the stuff of these on-the-road exhibitions, but that is not to diminish their impact as they warrant more than “showing them to people on my iPhone”.

Thom has an eye for composition, for using light in its natural and neon state, be it the sun glinting in the taxi’s mirror in her Tokyo street scene, or the vanilla sky framing Sydney Opera House, or the after-hours glow of Times Square. Even the 12-strong guitar radiates a blurred white light, as if suggesting the heat of concert combat still to come.

Thom can distil the essence of a place too, notably in her two Yorkshire Dales landscapes, where the green emptiness under big skies is broken only by two clumps of trees or a line of sheep. Likewise, the bikes resting on a petrol pump beside the classic car in Marseilles make you wonder where the contrasting journeys may lead next.

A social conscience plays its part in her photographs, as it is wont to do among the rock fraternity, as the flame passes from George Harrison to Bob Geldof and onwards to Bono. The Make Trade Fair sign in Malawi is as stark a photo as its message, written in block capitals: “We have a chance to lift millions out of poverty. Only one thing is missing. You.” By photographing it, Sandi spreads that message: a simple action in response to a simple statement that can have a knock-on effect.

Her Malawi scenes are more the stuff of photojournalism and magazine spreads, be it the venerable Emily or the close-up of the orphanage children, none of them smiling for the camera.

While those images work best for their straightforward presentation, Thom is understandably experimenting with form and content too, from a drum stick almost turned into an X-ray, to the manipulated wiry light playing on the water of Sydney at night.

There is further room for development, not least because she favoured places over faces in her selection for her debut show, when the portraiture promises to be the more striking in the long run.

• Sandi Thom’s debut exhibition runs at Nunnington Hall, near Helmsley, until July 31; normal opening times and charges apply. Prints are for sale.

Sandi plays Pocklington Arts Centre’s 10th Anniversary Music Festival on August 8; box office, 01759 301547 or pocklingtonartscentre.co.uk