Real Work. Real Food. Shot right.

From bakers to brewers, makers to markets — I photograph food, drink, and the hands that make them. Based in Dorset, often found up a muddy track or beside a harbour wall, camera in hand — but I’ll work wherever there’s a good story to tell.

In 2022, I achieved a lifelong goal: Fellowship of the Royal Photographic Society.

It all began with a single image, bought at a second-hand camera fair in the 1980s. On the back was a name: Joan Wakelin FRPS. She explained what those letters meant — and told me that anyone could earn them, if they kept taking photos and working at it.

That conversation stuck. Nearly forty years later, I became a Fellow myself.

The image I bought that day — a simple sunset over water, with a boat chugging through — still hangs on my office wall. It reminds me where this journey began.

Fellowship is a big deal: fewer than 600 of the RPS’s 11,000 members hold one. That path — from Licentiate, to Associate (in wedding photography), to Fellowship — changed the way I work and see.

I wouldn’t have got there without the support of family, friends, and some generous mentors.

Do clients need to know all this? Perhaps not. But do they benefit from it? Absolutely. The images I make now are calmer, more focused, more intentional — a world away from what I could have done when I started out.

Each Fellowship panel includes a Statement of Intent — a short piece of writing explaining what the photographer set out to achieve. Here’s mine, for the panel of 21 square images above (three rows of seven):

Give us this day…

Bread has always fascinated me: flour, salt and water is all you need to make magic happen. Baking is therapy.

My grandfather was a baker’s boy. I traced my great, great, great grandfather, Master Baker, Thomas, to his birth in 1805 in Pembury, in Kent. The family had shops in St Albans, Epping and through London.

Initially I was creating marketing material for The Real Bread Campaign, and the bakeries too. Recording small family bakeries, before they vanish, I found myself mesmerised by the skill and timing required for teams of bakers to get everything out on time. An intangible blend of art and science has breads and morning goods all ready when the shop doors open.

Working through overnight shifts allowed me to be largely documentary in my approach whilst I followed loaves from raw ingredients to finished masterpieces as bakers create our daily bread.

Food Glorious Food

There is something that I never tire of photographing: food. (And drink!)

I don't just mean quick snaps of meals - though I confess that I do that too. I mean food as culture, food as passion, food as story.

My wife and I often plan our holidays around great food. So it’s no surprise that over time food photography moved from the sidelines to the heart of my work.