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 »

With due deference to the UK TV programme of the same name I thought it fitted this shot from an editorial feature I did a couple of weeks ago.

Chris and Simon are property developers. But not like the guys on TV. Oh no. These guys are top-end, renovating very very large homes and offices in very very prestigious locations for some very rich clients! And so it came to pass that I found myself booked to shoot a series of portraits to accompany an interview feature for a leading property magazine. Read more from this entry »

Here’s a quick frame from a recent stock shoot where the subject was lifestyle. Yes, this is northern England, and yes, the sun is shining. I hadn’t planned this at all but this sort of weather is rarer than a Tottenham premiership win and I just had to take the opportunity. Daughter and boyfriend were here for the weekend so off we went out into the fields to shoot some stock. Read more from this entry »

Here’s an image from a shoot this week that wasn’t planned at all. As with life in general, sometimes things don’t go to plan. When this happens there are two things you can do: a) give up; or b) make the best out of the situation. I had been commissioned by FourFourTwo football magazine to shoot three football players for a feature. On the morning of the shoot one of the players had to pull-out which left me with two to shoot. The magazine wanted a white background so I arrived at the club and set up the background and lighting. Shot the first player in his kit, as per the brief, and all was well… Read more from this entry »

I spend a lot of my time shooting editorial portraits to accompany interview features. My job is to arrive in the daily hectic lives of very busy people, make some great images, then get out again. A sort of photographic SAS raid. Its a fact of life that busy people don’t have all day to spend on a photoshoot and often I have a time frame of 30 mins to do my thing. An hour is a luxury.

The timeframe of a shoot dictates what can be achieved. Lighting and composing a good editorial portrait often takes longer than shooting it. But I always err on the side of quality over quantity so pre-planning is key. Read more from this entry »

Just got back from a week in Devon. Half rest & recuperation and half stock shooting. Mid August, England in the height of summertime. You’d expect blue skies, birds tweeting, ice creams, beaches packed, the smell of fish and chips, extortionate car-park charges…… and you’d be wrong (apart from the car park charges). Read more from this entry »