about

Tell me more
I live in Cambridge in the UK. If you see someone with a large camera wandering around the colleges, the parks, the Botanic Garden, or shooting the almond croissants in Pret, stop me and say hello.

Can I buy some prints?
Of course! All the images on this site are available as prints. There is more information just here.

What else can you do for me?
If you live in the area and you are looking for a photographer to shoot photos of you and your family or someone to take candids at your party, wedding, or other event, get in touch as I’d love to discuss the idea further.

I promise a friendly, pragmatic, and cost-effective approach with photographs processed and online for you to view within 48 hours – or quicker, if that’s required. Photos are placed in a private gallery for preview and delivered online or via DVD. I provide full size, high quality digital files for you to use as you wish: everything I shoot for you is yours. You can make as many prints of whatever kind you like. I’ll provide help and advice on printing, mounting, and framing at no extra charge.

How?
I shoot with a Canon 5D Mk II or a 40D, usually with the 50mm f/1.4 on the front. The 135mm f/2 L is there when needed. Everything is shot in RAW, processed in Lightroom (with the odd stab of Photoshop), and looks better on a Mac Book Pro than anywhere else.

Why?

I take the shots and I play with the shots and occasionally something that appeals to me or to another appears before me. There’s no scientific process. It’s change this and slide that and move the other and sometimes… there it is.

Finding even the smallest shred of creativity within me – manifested in the photographs you see on this site and in nothing else – is down to a unique combination of twenty-first century technology within a centuries-old environment.

Without the advent of digital photography (the means to rapidly, accurately, and deeply record the often fleeting glimpses of the life which surrounds me) and without the rise of the hardware and software able to interpret and process this record and to turn the raw material of the scene into something approaching my own impressions and desires, I would be lost – or rather, have never been found in the first place. These hands cannot manage the precise, careful, and mannered touch required of an patient artist. Yet on a purely manual basis, photography takes the move of a dial or two and the click of a shutter. And that? They can do. Rendering the same scene or creating the same impressions through words, painting, drawing, or even colouring nicely between the lines? Not so much.

The means to make the images stands within a well of potential that rarely seems to run dry, barring the odd cold, dank, and gloomy week in February. The immediate surroundings of a university town in England older than many countries in the world and with gardens and natural resources that have matured over centuries provides more opportunities than anyone can properly handle. Certainly more than my children can handle me handling as I stop to grab another few shots.

Had I been born a hundred years earlier, I would be watching as the paintings of Monet, Pissaro, and Guillaumin emerged from France feeling that this was the way the world should be represented were I in charge of its aesthetic design. Yet I would never have contemplated picking up a brush and trying myself, all artistic impluses dead since school. But the potential abilities of photography in the first decades of the twenty-first century have located a flourish of creativity within me that I never otherwise would have known existed.

Having said all that? Mostly, I take photos and I make photos because it’s fun.