For nearly 50 years Douglas Corrance has been photographing the people and places of Scotland, capturing historical events that still resonate today as well as solitary moments that would have gone unrecorded had he not been present with his camera.

Some of his finest examples include a young girl playing in a now-demolished Glasgow street, and rock great Jimmy Page alone in his secluded Highland home.

Now a career-spanning collection of Mr Corrance's work is to be published in book form, with an introduction by the photographer and expansive captions detailing the stories behind what is an extraordinary visual record of half a century of Scottish life, whether it's Ravenscraig's last day as a functioning steel mill, a portrait of the attendant at Glasgow's last steamie or the many changes Mr Corrance has seen in decades of street photography in Edinburgh and Glasgow.

Titled Scotland: Five Decades Of Photographs, it is published on September 13 (Lomond Books, £25) and also features portraits of influential Scots such as Richard Demarco, Billy Connolly, James Kelman, Ian Rankin and Richard Holloway, as well as Led Zeppelin guitarist Page, whom Mr Corrance got to know when the band was at the height of its powers in the mid-1970s.

"I did get quite friendly with him," Mr Corrance recalled. "I remember one time there was nobody at his house and somebody had left his Bentley there so I had to take him out there in my beaten-up Renault, and buy some bread and beans to cook him beans on toast when we got there.

"But he was a lovely guy and we had some good times. I photographed some of their concerts and got a little insight into the rock and roll life as well."

Now 64, Mr Corrance's career behind the lens began aged 15 at the Highland News in his hometown of Inverness. "I was meant to be starting as a trainee graphic artist," he said. "I'd never actually had a camera in my hand but my first day on the job the graphic department closed down, so I was told I could help out in the darkroom."

Six months later one of the paper's photographers became editor and Mr Corrance was given a promotion – and a camera of his own. Handed to him on the Friday night, he was told to learn how to use it over the weekend and on the following Monday he started life as a newspaper photographer. The rest, as they say, is history, and in the half-century since it's been rare for him to leave his house without his camera. Despite being mugged, shot at and bombed in war zones, he describes his life behind the lens as "an incredible adventure". "It's not my line," he added, "but I've had a champagne lifestyle on beer wages".