A Royal Air Force officer for 17 years, I spent a significant part of my career within Tactical Reconnaissance, which is a formal way of saying I was trained to read light, terrain and timing long before anyone handed me a camera for fun. Understanding how light behaves — on film, on a sensor — has been a professional skill for most of my working life. What I've had to learn since is a different discipline entirely: hand-held, mirrorless, no flight plan and no second pass. Just patience, and being in the right place when an animal decides to be interesting.
Most of my published recognition, to date, has actually come from the sea rather than the savanna. I'm an RYA Yachtmaster with three Atlantic crossings behind me, and that's where the photography first started to earn its keep. My photography and writing have picked up the Cruising Association Photo of the Year, the International Cruisers Award for Best Photo of the Year, and the Explorer Travel Group Photo of the Year, and I've twice been selected for exhibition at Chatham Dockyard as part of the Historic Ships Annual Photography competition — including a place in their calendar. My images turn up regularly in the yachting press: Cruising, Yachting Monthly, Yachting World, and Latitudes & Attitudes.
That's the work that's paid the bills and picked up the trophies. But long before any of it, and increasingly since, what's actually pulled me out of bed before dawn is wildlife — the elephants of Shamwari, the ice of the Antarctic Peninsula, a leopard in Rajasthan holding perfectly still. That pull now extends to conservation work too, including an ongoing collaboration with the Centre for Wildlife Studies in India. This site is where that half of the work finally gets a proper home.