My Story

I graduated in 2000 with a degree in Visual Communication, specialising in Illustration.

My world at the time was almost entirely monochrome. Pencil, pen, line, shadow and texture. I loved drawing, and I was good at it, but I graduated into a world where there simply wasn't much demand for illustrators.

The harder truth was that I wasn't yet good enough to make a living from it.

That was a bitter pill to swallow.

I had always assumed that being creative would be enough. It wasn't. So I adapted, moved into graphic design and entered the commercial creative world. In simple terms, I needed to make money.

That decision ended up giving me a career that I could never have predicted.

Over the years I worked within the design industry, including within blue-chip design agencies, and found myself working alongside some incredibly talented photographers. I became fascinated by what they did, the way they could take something that existed in front of a camera and turn it into something that could communicate an idea, an emotion or a story.

I'd always owned cameras. Like most people, I'd used them to photograph holidays, family, friends and everyday life.

But photography changed for me in 2010, when my daughter was born and I bought my first ‘proper’ camera, a Canon 5d MKii

At first, it was simply another way of documenting life. But gradually it became something more. I started learning, experimenting and becoming increasingly obsessed with the process of making an image rather than simply recording one.

For years, though, I struggled with colour, a lot.

Being colourblind, I could never quite trust what I was producing. I'd look at an image and know that something wasn't right, but often couldn't work out exactly what it was. I could spend hours trying to correct something that I couldn't properly see in the first place.

Then, around 2019, I stopped trying to make colour work and I embraced black and white, suddenly, everything changed.

It felt like the world became visible.

All the things I'd always been drawn to were there: line, form, texture, light, shadow, contrast and expression. It connected directly back to the pencil and pen drawings I'd loved making years earlier.

It was my revolution.

Black and white stopped being a limitation and became my visual language.

Perhaps that's why I find it difficult to define my photography by subject. I photograph people, street scenes, wildlife, architecture, sport and documentary subjects. I make portraits and fine art nude work. I photograph quiet moments and chaotic ones.

The subject changes but the way I see it doesn't.

I'm interested in character, atmosphere and the small details that make an image feel alive. I'm drawn to faces, gestures, texture and light. I'm interested in what happens when you remove colour and leave only the things that matter.

For most of my photographic life, I've kept the work largely to myself.

Photography has been my escape from commercial creativity, a place without briefs, clients, deadlines or approval. After spending so much of my career solving other people's visual problems, it became somewhere I could simply follow my own instincts.

But I'm beginning to think it deserves more than that.

Fallow deer buck in Harold Hill near Romford, Essex

I've spent years developing my eye as a designer and illustrator, and more than a decade developing my eye as a photographer. I may not have followed the traditional route into professional photography, but perhaps that's exactly why my work looks the way it does.

I'm now ready to see what happens when I stop treating photography as something I do on the side and start treating it as a serious creative practice.

I'm not particularly interested in becoming a photographer who can photograph everything for everyone, and i’m sorry to say, but wedding photography is not for me.

I'm interested in making photographs that look and feel like mine, and finding people who want to see them.

So, as the old saying goes, watch this space.

The Weekend I Stopped Hiding Behind the Camera

Listening for the Enemy: The Sound Mirrors at Dungeness