About

My practice

My work has evolved, starting with developing and printing my own 35mm film at college and leading to ten years spent mastering large-format technical cameras. I made my first image on 5×4 transparency film using a Wista camera in 2006 and that period included my Mulgrave work and the images for my book Vision and Craft which were made with a Linhof Technikardan 45S. I also worked with and developed my own black and white film using 10×8 (Arca and Chamonix) and a medium format camera — a Mamiya RZ67. I transitioned to digital capture in 2017.

I have two interconnected approaches. There is representational work: communicating what I feel about places I have come to know well, usually distilling aspects of the landscape. And there is abstract work: making fully or partially abstracted images where the subject is not really the object being photographed. In such cases I aim to make the objects in the frame sing and dance to the tune of a higher purpose — whether that is an idea, a narrative or a metaphor.

I seek to compose images with dynamic balance and I aim to construct portfolios that have meaning, flow and narrative while retaining a high degree of individual image quality, craft and vision.

Most of the time I work methodically with a Phase IQ4 150 digital back on a Cambo Actus technical camera using Rodenstock lenses. I describe that as ‘yin’ session photography. It slows me down and forces me to be predictive about what is happening in a session. It also enables the highest quality of image capture I know.

Alternatively, for more reactive work or for scouting — the ‘yang’ — I will use a GFX 100 II handheld. I find this balance of yin and yang in my photography to be crucial to my process. I edit my raw images in Capture One and print with Canon printers.

I also write and talk about art and photography including composition, artistic vision, craft and meaning in Viewpoints and other publications. I advocate retrospection and closed loop photography to develop more quickly as a photographer and I write about the experience and anecdotes of making images from my own days in the field.