Another treat of a shoot with Alison Limerick

11th May 2026

Shooting with Alison is always such a joy. She has such style and elegance along with a very clear idea of how to move. I’m pretty anal when it comes to positioning and pose and yet she put up with my micro-adjustments and too direction with immense grace and patience, as well as a lot of humour.

Women on the Edge

9th March 2026

My wife Charlie is a circus performer and singer / songwriter. She works with the mezzo-soprano opera singer Louise Innes and brings out a new show every year, and of course as the resident photographer I get roped in to work on the concept and execution of her posters. This year she wanted to go with a Thelma and Louise type vibe for the new show ‘Women on the edge’. Of course I couldn’t get them to drive off a cliff, so we went with jumping. Despite the fact that there are great cliffs not far from where I live, I felt that perhaps it wouldn’t be wise to have them dying for their art by leaping into the abyss, and of course I’d only get one shot at it. So I enlisted the help of Ai to create the sort of cliff that I thought would work – which took rather more prompting and cajoling than I thought it would – and then lugged a big rock into my studio for them to jump off. I thought the result actually turned out rather well!

Where Love Lives

8th December 2025

Every now and then a job pops up that feels like it’s wandered in from a parallel timeline — the sort where ’90s dance anthems are still new, vinyl is always yellow, and your teenage self is quietly losing their mind in the background.

A while I had the pleasure of shooting the imagery for Alison Limerick’s new album Spirit Rising. Yes — that Alison Limerick, of “Where Love Lives” fame. And yes — that “Where Love Lives,” the track that unexpectedly resurfaced this year in the John Lewis Christmas ad and promptly took over the country again like it was 1991.

Alison is an old friend and an absolute dream to photograph: calm, grounded, and with one of those faces that does half the work for you. The cover shot is intentionally intimate — eyes closed, soft light, a sense of someone completely present in themselves. The back cover… well, that strappy dress does most of the talking. My main job was keeping the light clean and letting the shape do its thing.

The label went bold with the vinyl — bright yellow, impossible to ignore — and I’m delighted they kept the images front and centre without drowning them in type. It’s always a small thrill seeing photographs translated into real, physical objects. Screens are fine, but print (and vinyl especially) has a way of making an image feel like it has a pulse.

A lovely project, a lovely human, and a bit of unexpected ’90s nostalgia woven in for good measure.

Back cover portrait of Alison Limerick for Spirit Rising

Mist and Morning Light

30th November 2025

I dragged myself up the hill before dawn last week, mostly on the promise that the world might give me something quiet and unexpected. It did. The moment I reached the ridge, everything dropped into stillness — the kind that wraps around you and shuts out the rest of the noise. Mist pooled across the fields, not drifting so much as unfolding, revealing and hiding whole chunks of landscape as if it were deciding what I was allowed to see.

Standing there alone felt like being inside a moment that didn’t really need me but was kind enough to let me watch. Every few minutes the view shifted: a line of trees appearing like a sketch, birds cutting through pockets of cloud, the first light warming the fog into gold. Nothing dramatic, nothing overplayed — just nature doing what it does when nobody’s looking.

It’s easy to forget how grounding it is to be out there by yourself, with no sound except your breathing and the odd bird wondering what you’re doing on its hill. Those minutes before the sun properly arrives always get me — the sense that the world is waking in layers, and you’re lucky enough to be standing in the middle of it.