Hello! I'm Guy, a photographer based in Wokingham. Husband, father, and at heart a storyteller. I failed miserably at drawing and painting, but a camera let me express myself, and photography is without doubt my nirvana. Most of all I love watching the light, and seeing shape and form everywhere I go. I love taking images of everything.
How I started
I found landscape photography over twenty years ago, on a course in Whitby with Joe Cornish. And that was my first experience of the dark cloth of a large-format camera. Ever tried looking at an image upside down and back to front, under a dark cloth, in a gale? It gives you a very different perspective, and the uncanny ability to think upside down. I bought my own 5x4, a single lens and a box of Velvia, and taught myself the slow way. What I learnt there I have carried ever since: wait, anticipate, and take one image at a time.
For me it has always been about subtlety: the softest tones, delicate light, naturally rendered and a little painterly. I don't hold with rules of thirds or any of that. I photograph what moves me, in colour, as I see it.
Wedding photography
Photographing weddings is something many photographers shy away from. I love them! They are happy occasions, and best of all they are usually day-long events, so I get completely immersed in what is going on: connecting with the bride and groom, offering gentle advice or a steadying hand, even a pair of scissors for cutting off stray threads. It's a cliché, but I do feel privileged to witness such an important day. I think of my parents, who still, fifty years on, show their wedding album. To create family history like that is humbling.
Family portraits
My take on family portraiture is that I absolutely get what families are like. As the father of a young daughter I understand what makes children let someone take their picture. Catching them unaware or pestering them is not how it's done. Patience. Interest in what they are doing. Calmness. The photograph is the very last thing to do. Sit the parents down, and let the children come to them.
Landscape photography
My work in the landscape grounds me. I have learnt so much from being outdoors. Waiting, mostly patiently. Returning again and again to the same spot. Spending hours without exposing a single frame, judging the light, watching the weather, totally focused.
In the end I don't subscribe to sticking to one type of photography. Every type comes down to the same three things: composition, light and timing. Put me behind a camera and I have a huge smile on my face.
Over the years my work has been published by The Artfile and featured in Professional Photography magazine, and here and there in the Telegraph, The Times, the Scotsman and on the BBC. And for twenty years I was the photographer for the charity Walk the Walk, at events from a handful of people to seventeen thousand.
If you like what you see, get in touch. There is no harm in asking, and I might just be what you are after.