photographic services

Welcome to the site, a friend built it for me as a means of getting my photography out into the world and as a place for people to see what I am capable of commercially. This work can be found in the Product gallery and is made up of staircase shots I took for Spiral Staircase Systems, a few interiors shots for the custom installation company Power Plant and a selection of hi-fi component images. I am always looking for new challenges and would like to expand my commercial portfolio so if you have a product or place that you would like shot I’d be thrilled to hear from you.

The rest of the site contains images that I have shot because the subject appealed to me. These are collected in various galleries for the sake of organisation but do not necessarily fit precisely into their given slot. I am drawn to anachronism in the commercial world, products that seem out of their temporal place and would one day like to put together an exhibition of images that broadly fit into the category retail. If you are interested in prints or digital copies of any picture my prices are very reasonable.

Forget crampons – screw your shoes

In this icy weather there is a solution to getting about town without having to resort to walking on the road, namely screw shoes. By screwing short wood- or self-tapping screws into the soles of some old shoes you can transform them into footwear that offers traction on the most slippery of surfaces. Just make sure you don’t use screws that are long enough to pierce the inside of the shoe otherwise they might get a tad uncomfortable after the first step.

I’d like to say that I thought of this but I found it whilst looking for ways to make mountain biking in the snow slightly more practical, apparently it comes from the running world where traction in slippery conditions is almost as important as not having an SPD pedal full of ice.

Mastering the art

The Power House recording studios in Chiswick are a sound enthusiasts wet dream. Rooms dedicated to great sound filled with equipment that's capable of reproducing it. The studios I visited recently were those used by mastering engineers, the men who make records - and I use that term in the broadest possible sense - sound the way they do. They can only change the tonal balance, phase and degree of compression or otherwise but they are the final link in the production of recorded music and thus can make a big difference to the end result.

The mastering engineer is one of the few people in the chain who always works in the same room with the same equipment - the guys at the Power House use Bryston amps and PMC loudspeakers, really big PMC loudspeakers. So they have a better point of reference than the producers and engineers who go from one studio to the next and have to translate what comes through the monitors and how the room affects that into what the music will sound like when it's played at home or on an iPod.