About Me

How it started

My dad had a magic memory box. He could catch a moment with it, and months or years later we'd relive it in the living room, on the big screen, courtesy of the slide projector. I was fascinated.

Words were another matter. I was dyslexic, though nobody knew it then, and getting my ideas across the way school wanted was a struggle. Pictures were different. They could say what I couldn't, and far more people understood them.

So I pestered my parents for a camera of my own. I got a Fuji for a school trip to Scarborough when I was nine, and I took far more film than any nine-year-old needs, because I wanted to record all of it.

That was the start of an obsession. My pocket money went on film. When I was older and working part time, a lot of my pay went on film and developing too. The camera came everywhere with me, and it still does. If I'm going somewhere, it's coming too, whether that's London or the pub.

Learning the craft

After school I spent three years at Ridge Street School of Art and Design in Watford. Photography was part of the course, and it's where I first developed my own film and first worked in a darkroom. I can still remember the smell of the chemicals.

College also opened my eyes to the photographers who'd done it best. Its books took me from commercial work to street, documentary, reportage and fine art, and somewhere in those pages my own style started to form. By my final year I was specialising in photography.

From there I went to the University of Derby and studied under John Blakemore, a master printer and one of Britain's most respected landscape and still life photographers. He taught me the Zone System, the method Ansel Adams worked out for getting the best exposure possible by deciding where every tone will fall before you press the shutter. He died in January 2025.

After university I kept taking pictures for fun.

The first commission

It started with a charity event at the New Zealand High Commission. One of the guests saw my pictures. He was having an apartment in London specially designed, and he wanted a London skyline as the talking point of the room.

The picture he chose was one of my super-high-resolution panoramas, taken from the penthouse of the New Zealand High Commission. It wasn't a print in a frame. It was printed specially, full size, and built into the wall. It was huge, and it looked better than I'd imagined it would.

He paid me well for it. That was when I realised my pictures had a commercial value, and that people might pay for what I'd been doing for fun all along.

The fireworks

I'd built up a portfolio of pictures of London, and I needed work, so I sent it to every organisation I could think of. One of them was Visit London, the capital's official visitor guide. It's run by London & Partners, the Mayor of London's promotional agency, and the Mayor organises the New Year's Eve fireworks. Visit London looked at my portfolio and my website, then got in touch to ask if I'd like to be the official photographer for the display. For a photographer in London, it doesn't get much bigger than that.

I did it for three years.

The job came with permission to go up onto rooftops across London that are closed to the public, so I could find the best place to shoot from. I went up a lot of them. I basically had the keys to the kingdom, and I saw some of London's most spectacular views.

I got to know Titanium Fireworks, who put on the display. One year they let me set up right in front of their control booth on the bank of the Thames.

That first year I was shooting as a Pentax ambassador. The pictures went viral on social media, and Hasselblad got in touch. Every year after that, I shot the fireworks on their kit. Panasonic lent me cameras to film the display, and the Vanguard tripods I used turned into an ambassadorship.

One of those pictures became National Geographic's Photo of the Day on New Year's Day, online and in print. It was the third time they'd published my work.

Then Hasselblad asked me to tell the whole story on stage at The Photography Show at the NEC in Birmingham. I took the audience from how I got the job to the final edit: the rooftops, the Hasselblad I shot on, the night itself, and the small matter of getting home on New Year's Eve with all that kit. Vanguard later asked me to speak at two camera expos in London, and to run a workshop on shooting motorsport at Brands Hatch.

Disclosure: Hasselblad and Panasonic loaned me equipment for this work, and Sony lent me cameras for Birmingham 2022. I'm a Vanguard ambassador and an Xbox Ambassador, and I was a Pentax ambassador. Where any of them appear on this site, I'll say so.

Other work

The relationship with Titanium Fireworks didn't end on the Thames. In 2022 Birmingham Ceremonies Ltd, who produced the opening and closing ceremonies of the Birmingham Commonwealth Games, offered me the job of photographing the fireworks. Titanium were doing the display there too. They vouched for me, and that got me special access.

Back on the ground, I've photographed TEDx, and members of the royal family at national events. And I kept going back to the New Zealand High Commission, photographing events for them and for Kiwi organisations and charities in London.

Some of the work came looking for me. Madame Tussauds had seen my pictures and got in touch, and when they unveiled their Dwayne Johnson figure in London, The Rock stood in front of one of my photographs. The wax one, anyway.

A special effects company found my GigaPan images of the London skyline, super-high-resolution panoramas stitched together from many frames. They used one of my London pictures in a special effects sequence for a Hollywood action film released by Paramount Pictures, and it went out on cinema screens.

It started out just for fun, in a living room with a slide projector. The screens have got a bit bigger since.

Now

These days I photograph events, weddings and London, and I write: poetry, and essays on deception at work, psychology, books, dyslexia and artificial intelligence. They're on my Writing Blog. I write for businesses too; see Writing Services. Not bad for a boy who couldn't get his ideas into words.

If you're thinking of hiring me, About You explains how I work.

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