A barrister who admitted filming up girls' skirts in supermarkets denied he got any sexual gratification from it, a court heard.

Simon Austin Hamilton, 35, from London, said the pleasure he took was in the collecting and cataloguing the images.

He said he gave up his habit of "upskirting" when he joined the Bar because he felt it was "inappropriate".

He told the jury at Canterbury Crown Court: "Collecting is something my family is very prone to. We're collectors of pretty much anything.

"I would spend the vast majority of my time cataloguing the images as opposed to looking at them.

"It was the sort of gratification of a job well done."

The barrister, from Harringay, said he had started "upskirting" when he worked part time and had "too much time on his hands".

At the time he lived in Bosham, near Chichester.

He argued that a video recording he took of a 14-yearold girl sitting unawares in a leisure centre, in which he zoomed in on her knickers with a secret camera, was not indecent because he had believed she was over 16.

Hamilton said: "Knowing the law as I did and the definition of indecent images, that is not even on the scale."

Hamilton faces charges including outraging public decency, taking an indecent photograph of a child, and making and possessing indecent photographs of a child, between January 2001 and July 2003.

He denies all the charges. The case continues.