A belated Happy New Year to everyone I know (and those I don’t yet know but may be getting to know in 2009…er…best stop before I get myself further into any Rumsfeldisms).   Its cold.  I hate the cold.  Read more from this entry »

Just to prove the weathermen wrong I had glorious weather for a recent shoot with England cricket saviour, Andrew “Freddie” Flintoff.   The location was Old Trafford,  Lancashire Cricket Club, and I was on a commission from Spin magazine to shoot some portraits of Freddie while he was working his way back to fitness from a recent injury. Read more from this entry »

If there’s one guy who has really taken regeneration of urban areas (especially Manchester) by the scruff of the neck and shaken it until it squeaks it’s Tom Bloxham.  Tom’s property development company Urban Splash invests in regenerating inner city areas by taking old warehouses and office blocks and creating cool living spaces out of them.  Read more from this entry »

… I am not!  But during a session in the studio that combined shooting stock with a bit of experimentation I found myself shooting some close ups of chillies and sun-dried tomatoes.   I was trying to get a shadowless wraparound light effect, soft yet well defined.  Read more from this entry »

OK, OK, I know I haven’t posted since January but circumstances overtook me, sorry! I had this blog in my sights but never quite got to it. Anyway, I’ve got a fair bit to blog about having been silent for 5 months so lets start…

It’s late April and I get a commission to go and shoot new young fast bowler of English cricket, Stuart Broad. Brief was to get some portrait shots of Stuart while he was on a promo day for VW and that I’d have an hour to share with the journalist doing an interview at the same time. There’s a possibility this could be a cover shoot and there’s nothing like that to sharpen the mind. So I set off to the location – Trent Bridge the home of Nottingham CC. Read more from this entry »

Happy New Year everyone. I hope you all had a good rest and are raring to go in 2008. Somebody needs to tell the weather though.

Its past mid-January now and the big shiny yellowy thing in the sky has overslept. It was last seen sometime in mid-December. Would anyone who lives nearby please go and wake it up. There’s nothing much you can do when as Morrissey would say “Every day is like Sunday, every day is silent and grey”. That pretty much sums up the current weather here in the north of the UK. Oh, and its rained shedloads too…. Read more from this entry »

Just finished a complete back-end redesign of the website. I think you’re going to like this. The new site has given me the opportunity to make all the images 50% larger. A happy aside is that its about 100% faster than the old site! This means you can flip through the folio pretty seamlessly and change galleries without reloading a menu screen. Read more from this entry »

God bless Phil Lynott and Gary Moore for writing that tune. I had it humming round my head last week as I found myself unexpectedly footsore in Paris.

Unfortunately I arrived just as the French decided en-masse to go on strike. The Paris metro was running about one train in seven on some lines and on others, nothing at all. Taxis were scarce. You couldn’t book one, all the ranks had queues at them longer than the ones outside Northern Rock. Trying to hail one was evidently not working – as witnessed by the number of people literally running out in front of them waving money…..

So, I had to get round on foot…. Read more from this entry »

First off, apologies for the lack of updates. Its been a manic couple of weeks. So I thought I’d reward you with a long post about a shoot I did last month with Michelin starred chef & restaurateur Terry Laybourne. I was commissioned by Restaurant magazine to shoot a cover and feature on Terry, perhaps the North’s most famous chef. Having just watched the last series of “Hell’s Kitchen” I had visions of my 70-200 becoming a 35-100 as the result of a swift swing of a meat cleaver. But I shouldn’t have worried. He is a very nice man indeed. Read more from this entry »

I recently had the pleasure of working with Joel Dickinson, a young entrepreneur who has set up a great store www.geniegadgets.com selling the most amazing gadgets and boys toys (and girls too!) you can imagine.

Joel’s team got in touch to get me to help with a promotional campaign, for which they wanted an image that was vibrant, punchy and overall, fun!

This is the story of how that image came together… Read more from this entry »