I’m not writing this for ‘photographers’ in the traditional sense. I’m writing this for everyone else. For the person who thinks photography is something other people do. For the person who assumes that without an expensive camera, or technical knowledge, or some innate artistic gift, there is no point. For the person who takes the occasional snap on their phone and then immediately apologises for it. In short, for the person who would never refer to themselves as a ‘photographer’ – something I still struggle with myself.

But I have discovered - you are a photographer. Every time you point a camera - at anything - and press the button, you are a photographer. Even if only for that moment. Even if the image is wonky, or out of focus, or has your thumb annoyingly in the corner. Even if nobody ever sees it but you. Art, in all forms, is subjective, and technical quality is not the point. What the photograph means is the point. And a photograph can mean everything, regardless of how it was made.

I know this because some of my most treasured photographs are not “technically” good. They are snapshots, grabbed on disposable cameras and early digital devices, slightly overexposed or badly framed. They are photographs of people I love, at moments I didn’t know I would one day need to hold onto. My childhood memories are shaped, in part, by what photographs are available. The ones that exist, I can visit. The ones that weren’t taken, I can only try to reconstruct from what remains in my head - and that, over time, is less and less reliable.

When someone is no longer here, you will not care whether the photograph is technically good. You will not care about the aperture or the composition or whether the light was flattering. You will just be grateful, down to your core, that it exists. That there is something frozen in time that says: this person was here, on this earth, and I was with them, and this is what that looked like. That is what photographs are really for. Not Instagram. Not the approval of strangers. Just that.

Ted and Vera understood this. I’ve written about them before - a couple whose extensive collection of slides and prints very nearly ended up in a skip when they passed away and their home was sold. They had photographed their lives for literal decades: family gatherings, European travels, flower shows, average Sundays. All of it meticulously organised, labelled and carefully preserved. The care they took with those photographs, the decades they spent maintaining them, told you everything about how much they valued what they had captured. They knew, instinctively, what most of us understand far too late: that the truly “ordinary” moments are the ones most worth keeping.

So here is what I want to say, on World Photography Day, to anyone who has ever thought that photography wasn’t for them.

You don’t need expensive kit. A phone camera is still a camera. It is an extraordinary piece of technology that fits in your pocket and is almost certainly capable of making images that will mean the world to you in twenty years. Use it. But if you want to be more intentional about photography - and I’d encourage you to be, because there is something about picking up a dedicated camera that changes the way you look - you don’t need to spend much. A second-hand camera from a charity shop, a car boot sale, Facebook Marketplace or Vinted can cost almost nothing. A disposable camera is the same price as a fancy cocktail and requires no knowledge whatsoever. The barrier is much lower than you think.

Being intentional matters because phones are distracting. When you pick up a camera - a real one, even a cheap one - the only thing it does is take photographs. You are not one notification away from losing the moment. You are just there, looking, deciding what’s worth keeping. That shift in attention is small and significant at the same time.

You don’t need to share what you make, though I would gently encourage it. Send a photograph to someone you love. Show a friend a picture you took of them that they haven’t seen. Share something publicly (if you feel comfortable) - not because the world necessarily needs to see it, but because photographs have a way of finding people they were meant to find. The Archive of Ordinary Lives, the Instagram account I run sharing Ted and Vera’s rescued slides, is proof of that. Strangers write to me regularly to say that an image of two people they never met has moved them, reminded them of someone, taken them somewhere they didn’t expect to go. Photographs travel in ways we can’t predict.

Print things too. I cannot say this strongly enough. A photograph on a screen is one of thousands, endlessly scrollable, easily lost. A photograph in your hand is a different object entirely. There is something about holding a print - feeling the weight of it, the edges of it - that a screen simply cannot replicate. A 4x6 print costs almost nothing, and yet the experience of having it, of putting it on a shelf or tucking it into a card or framing it on your sideboard, or even simply holding it for a moment, is worth so much more than its price suggests. If you are taking photographs out of love - of people, of places, of moments you want to keep - print them. Make them real. Give them somewhere to exist beyond a camera roll that nobody will ever reach the bottom of.

And if you think you’re not good enough - let me push back on that. Good enough for what? For whom? Photography is not a competition. It is not a qualification. It is one human being pointing something at the world and saying: I noticed this. I wanted to keep it. That impulse - that quiet, stubborn insistence on the value of the ordinary - is not something you need to earn the right to feel.

Pick up a camera. Point it at someone you love, or something that makes you feel something, or the light coming through a window at a particular angle that you’ve never quite been able to describe in words. Press the button. You don’t need to know what you’re doing. You just need to start.

The photographs you take today are the ones you’ll be grateful for later. I promise you that.

If this has sparked something, here are a few books worth finding - not technical manuals, but books about what photography is and what it can do. Start anywhere. And as always, try your local independent bookshop before reaching for Amazon - galleries are also wonderful places to find photography books you wouldn’t otherwise stumble across.

Use This if You Want to Take Great Photographs: A Photo Journal by Henry Carroll is exactly what it sounds like - a guided journal that combines practical advice with space to actually do the work. Carroll has a gift for making photography feel accessible without dumbing it down.

One Photo a Day Keeps the Doctor Away by Joost Joossen does what it says on the tin - a prompt for every day of the year, built around the simple but powerful idea that the habit of looking is good for you. It is.

Be a Super Awesome Photographer: 20 Photo Challenges Inspired by the Masters - also by Henry Carroll - takes the work of iconic photographers and turns them into accessible challenges. A brilliant way to learn from the greats without being intimidated by them.

And if books feel like too much of a commitment to start with, buy a blank notebook and use it to jot down what you want to photograph and why. Instagram and Substack are full of photographers generously sharing prompts and ideas - on Substack is a great place to start.

That probably sounds like a strange thing to say, but it’s true. Yesterday’s partial solar eclipse - the most significant visible from the UK and Ireland since the 1999 eclipse, with around 90-96% of the Sun covered by the Moon depending on location - was, by any measure, a rare and extraordinary event. You’d have to wait until 2090 for the next total solar eclipse visible from the UK. This was, in other words, a once-in-a-generation moment for most of us. And my instinct, as it almost always is, was to point the camera not at the sky but at the faces turned towards it.

My dad and I went to Glastonbury Tor. We always seem to end up at the Tor together for the significant moments - the Summer Solstice earlier this year, Celtic New Year, and now this. There is something about that hill that draws people when the sky does something extraordinary, and it draws them in numbers. The crowd yesterday felt like Solstice - which is to say, enormous, electric, and entirely its own thing.

The climb was particularly brutal. It is always a climb, but yesterday was something else - the heat was intense in a way that felt almost deliberate with temperatures of 34 degrees, as if the sun was making one last emphatic point before the moon arrived to cover it. We sweated our way up and arrived at the top slightly undone but very glad to be there.

The viewing equipment was one of the great unexpected joys of the afternoon. Glastonbury does not do things in halves, and the crowd had come prepared - or improvised magnificently. Official eclipse glasses jostled with welding masks, makeshift box projectors fashioned from cereal packets and washing soap boxes, binoculars, colanders held up to cast crescent-shaped shadows on upturned palms, and my personal favourite, people wearing three or four pairs of sunglasses stacked on top of each other with the optimistic air of people who had read somewhere that this was a viable method. It wasn’t, strictly speaking, but it was very funny and very human and I loved all of it.

I had been given a filter for my phone by a very kind lady in The Tea Room at Bath Place, which allowed me to photograph the eclipse itself - just about. It was technically demanding and not really where my attention was. What I wanted to photograph was the observers. The upturned faces. The expressions of concentration, wonder, mild bewilderment. The children who weren’t entirely sure what they were supposed to be looking at. The dogs - and there were dogs, because there are always dogs at the Tor - who were completely uninterested in the eclipse and therefore functionally the most relaxed beings on the hill.

The light was the thing I hadn’t quite anticipated. As the moon moved across the sun, the quality of the light shifted in a way that was deeply strange. First an intense golden hour - richer and more saturated than normal, the kind of light I spend entire mornings chasing with my camera - and then something else. A bluish haze. An eerieness. The temperature dropped. It was not dark, not even close - we were at 91% coverage, not totality - but the world felt different in a way that was hard to explain and impossible to ignore. The Somerset Levels below us looked slightly unreal. Everything did, briefly.

That quality - the light changing, the atmosphere shifting, the world going momentarily strange - is what these astronomical events share with the folk rituals I spend my year documenting. At a solstice or an equinox, at a Beltane fire or a midwinter ceremony, there is always a moment where something tips. Where the ordinary world reasserts itself as something more than ordinary. The eclipse did that, and it did it to thousands of people simultaneously, on a hillside in Somerset, in the middle of a Tuesday evening. People gasped. People cheered. People put their arms around the strangers standing next to them. I don’t think any of them planned to do that.

Glastonbury has a particular quality that makes these moments feel even larger than they already are. I’ve written before about the Tor as a place I return to for things that feel worth marking - my birthday, the Solstice, and now this. There is a spirituality to it that is hard to pin down and easy to feel. People come here from everywhere, from all kinds of backgrounds and belief systems, drawn by something they can’t entirely name. Yesterday the sky gave them a reason, and they came in their thousands, with their welding masks and their cereal box projectors and their stacked sunglasses, and they looked up together. It was, in the very best sense, gloriously, absurdly human.

The eclipse lasted just under two hours in total. A few hours later, the Perseid meteor shower reached its peak in moonless skies - something I was too tired to stay up for, but which felt like a fitting coda to a day that had already given more than enough.

I came home and looked at the photographs. The eclipse itself, through the phone filter, is barely there - a pale disc with a bite taken out of it, technically captured and emotionally inert. The photographs I care about are the people. The upturned faces and the crescent shadows on palms and the dog sitting magnificently indifferent to it all. That’s the archive I want. Not the event itself, but the humans inside it.

That’s always been the bit worth keeping.

Not to get a good spot, though that helps. I arrive early because I need time to just be in a place before I start making photographs of it. To scan the space. To notice who is there and how they’re feeling. To watch what the light is doing, find the good backdrops, identify the corners and the edges where something interesting might happen. To get a feel for the atmosphere - because atmosphere shapes people, and people are usually what I’m there for.

That early time is not passive. It is some of the most active looking I do. I’m building a mental map of the place: where the light is falling well and where it’s too bright; where people are gathering and where they’re drifting; what the inanimate details are that might help tell the story of the event. A row of silver tankards of cider. Morris bells hanging on a peg. A dog with an improbably expressive face. These small things matter to me - they are the context in which the people exist, and without them the images can feel like they could have been made anywhere. I want photographs that could only have been made here, on this day, at this particular gathering.

I’ve become much more aware of light over time. It sounds obvious - photography is literally the writing of light - but I don’t think I understood it properly until I’d been doing this for a while. Now it’s one of the first things I clock when I walk into a space. Where is it coming from. What is it doing to people’s faces. Where might I position a subject to make the most of it. I love golden hour with a particular fervour - the warm orange of a good sunrise or sunset does something to a photograph that no amount of editing can replicate. When the light is right, everything else becomes easier.

What I look for within that has shifted over the years. Early on, I think I was drawn to the obvious moments - the peak of the action, the most photogenic face, the shot that was clearly there to be taken. Now I find myself looking for the things I hope most other people aren’t noticing. At folk events especially, there are often many photographers present, all pointing their cameras at the same thing. I want the image that’s different - the detail in the margin, the expression in the crowd rather than on the stage, the quiet moment happening just to the left of whatever everyone else is looking at.

Deciding who to photograph is harder to explain. I can’t fully articulate it, but I know it almost immediately. I’ll scan a crowd and most people simply don’t register in a particular way - and then something shifts, and I notice someone, and I know. It’s a bit like dating, in an odd way. You can be in a room full of people and only one of them creates that particular pull of attention. I don’t know what I’m responding to exactly. Something about the way they’re inhabiting their body. The quality of their presence. A sense that there is something in them that the camera will find interesting. Once I feel it, it’s certain. Before I feel it, I can’t force it.

When I’m photographing people away from an event - in quieter, more ordinary circumstances - I look beyond the face. Body language tells me more. What someone is doing with their hands. How they’re holding themselves. Whether they’re turned towards something or away from it. I use conversation to take the pressure off posing - if someone is talking about something they care about, they forget to perform for the camera, and that’s where the real photographs happen.

Grief has changed what I look for, I think. Or rather, it has deepened something that was already there. I’m more conscious now of the fact that you never know what someone is carrying. That a photograph might mean something to its subject that you can’t anticipate in the moment of making it. I always try to get contact details after I photograph someone - I want them to have the images. That instinct has grown stronger over the past year. You never know what a photograph might become to someone, later. I think about that more than I used to.

The photographer whose work feels most like what I’m reaching for is Sian Davey. Her series The Garden is something I return to again and again - a project in which she photographed a community of people, neighbours and strangers and everyone in between, in her back garden in Devon. What moves me about it is how distinct each subject is. Despite the fixed location, despite the same photographer and the same garden, every portrait feels completely specific to its person.

She writes: “As the garden evolved it became an expression of joy, interconnectedness, yearning, sexuality, and defiance. The garden became a metaphor for the human heart itself.”

She finds the individual inside the collective. I don’t think I’ve seen anyone do it better.

That’s what I’m looking for, I think, when I pick up the camera. Not a type of person, not a particular aesthetic, not even a specific moment. Something true about whoever is in front of me. Something that could not have been found anywhere else, in anyone else.

I’ll know it when I see it. I just have to keep looking.

What I didn’t expect was how much I’d love it.

Most of the time, I shoot with a Canon 5D Mark IV. It is a serious, heavy camera - brilliant, and I love it, but it is not something you chuck in a bag without thinking about it. It requires thought before you leave the house. It requires thought when you arrive somewhere. It asks you to engage with it in a particular way, which is part of what makes shooting with it so rewarding and also, occasionally, so exhausting. The disposable asked nothing of me. It sat at the bottom of my bag, light as nothing, and came out when something caught my eye - and then went straight back in. No settings. No review screen. No second-guessing. Just: I saw something, I pointed the camera at it, I pressed the button. Done.

I took it to Mallorca, to Bristol, to Glastonbury. I pointed it at anything that caught my eye, with no particular rhyme or reason. A colour. A shadow. A face. Something in the corner of a market. The light coming through a window at a particular angle. Normally when I’m shooting I’m making decisions - conscious ones, about what the photograph is for and who might see it and whether it’s the kind of image that belongs in my documentary work. With the disposable, none of that applied. These were for me. Just for me. And that turned out to be enormously freeing.

There is a nervousness to disposable shooting that is different from the nervousness I feel with my 5D. With the 5D, I worry about whether I’m capturing something well. With the disposable, I had no idea whether I was capturing anything at all. No preview. No RAW file to rescue later. Just the faith that something might come out. It opens up a whole other question about what makes a photograph good - and actually, shooting for myself, without any pressure to produce something technically strong, reframed that question completely. If the image serves as a memory - if it takes me back to a moment and makes me feel something - then by my measure, it’s a success. The bar shifted, and in shifting, it relaxed me in a way I hadn’t anticipated.

I sent the film to Southsun to be developed. Getting the photographs back was like reliving the trip - the colours warm and slightly soft in that particular way that disposable photographs have, the images slightly imperfect, the whole thing feeling like a document of something real and unguarded. There were a couple of shots with my fingers in the corner of the frame. I laughed out loud when I saw them. Genuinely howled. There is something about the fallibility of it - the absolute human imperfection of accidentally photographing your own hand - that felt like exactly the right way to end up. You couldn’t fake that. A camera that sophisticated enough to correct for it would have robbed me of the laugh.

I’ve written before about the pressure I put on myself when I’m shooting - the low-level anxiety about whether I’m in the right position, missing the moment, making the most of whatever I’ve turned up to. The disposable had none of that. Shooting for myself, with no audience in mind, the pressure simply wasn’t there. And what I found underneath the pressure was something quite pleasant: just the enjoyment of looking. Of noticing things. Of deciding, quickly and without overthinking it, that this is worth keeping.

Which is, when I think about it, why I started taking photographs in the first place.

I’m not about to swap my 5D for a disposable. The serious work requires a serious camera, and I love what that camera can do. But I think I’ll keep a disposable in my bag from now on - for the trips where I want to be in it rather than behind it, for the moments that are just for me, for the days when the most important thing is not to think too hard and just point at the light.

Fingers in the corner of the frame and all.

The shift happened on a photo walk with the Quantock Landscape Partnership Scheme - a wonderful organisation, worth knowing about if you’re in Somerset. I was shooting alongside other photographers, and one of them - noticing I was on Auto - couldn’t quite believe it. She sat with me for a while, showed me some settings, walked me through the logic of it. I’d watched videos and read guides before, but something about being shown in the moment, on location, with a camera in my hands, landed differently. I went home and spent real time relearning my camera. Not rushing it. Just sitting with it, working out what everything did and why.

It was, without overstating it, a turning point.

Shooting in Manual made me more mindful. That’s the word I keep coming back to. When the camera is making the decisions, you can fire away and hope for the best. When you’re making the decisions - the aperture, the shutter speed, the ISO, the relationship between all three - you have to slow down and actually think. About the light. About what you want to be in focus and what you want to fall away. About whether the image in your head is achievable in the conditions you’re standing in. It forced me to be present in a way that Auto simply didn’t require. And that presence - that deliberateness - changed the photographs.

It also changed my relationship with editing. My A-Level in photography was heavily Photoshop-based, all post-production and manipulation, and for a long time that was the frame I had for what editing meant. Heavy. Technical. Transformative. What Manual shooting gradually showed me was that if you get things right in camera - if you’re thinking about the light, the contrast, the bokeh, the exposure, before you press the shutter - you arrive at your editing software with images that need very little doing to them. The work has largely been done.

My editing process now is genuinely minimal. I shoot in both RAW and JPG and edit the RAW files in Lightroom. Mostly I’m adjusting levels, colour balance, shadows and highlights - small, considered changes that bring the image closer to what I actually saw rather than further from it. I soften the light slightly, because that tends to suit my style. And then I stop. The question I’m always asking is: does this still look like what actually happened?

That question matters to me more than most things. I describe my work as documentary, and I think that carries a responsibility. What I’m sharing is, at its core, a record of something real - a community, a ceremony, a person. If I push the edit too far, I’m no longer sharing a document. I’m sharing an interpretation, which is a different thing. For other kinds of photography, that’s completely valid. For mine, it doesn’t feel honest.

One thing I’m particularly firm about: I don’t edit people’s faces. People often say it - jokingly, self-consciously, the moment they agree to a photo being taken - “oh, can you photoshop that?” And I always say no. Not unkindly, but clearly. Nothing makes me happier than someone who usually hates photographs of themselves looking at one I’ve made and saying they love it. That reaction, when it happens, tells me I’ve done something right - not because I’ve smoothed anything out, but because I’ve caught them in a moment where they are genuinely themselves. That’s what I’m trying to do. Show people a true reflection and hope they find something beautiful in it.

I want to be clear that this is not a manifesto against heavy editing or artistic manipulation. I love photography in all its forms - I am, at heart, a photographer’s photographer, someone who finds joy in the whole spectrum of what the medium can do. The abstract, the experimental, the heavily processed - I admire all of it. People have different styles, different genres, different intentions, and that diversity is part of what makes photography extraordinary.

But I do think we are at a moment where the question of truth in photography is worth sitting with. AI can generate images that are indistinguishable from photographs. The line between what was captured and what was created is becoming harder and harder to locate. In that context, I find myself feeling increasingly committed to images that are documentably real. Not perfect. Not processed into something they weren’t. Just true - to the light, to the moment, to the person in the frame.

I do most of my editing before I press the shutter now. The rest is just catching up.

You see photographers working confidently through a crowd - camera up, close, unhesitating - and it looks easy. Natural. Like something they were born doing. What you don’t see is the internal negotiation that happens before any of that. The running assessment of the situation. The moment of decision. The small, specific courage it takes to walk up to a person you have never met and ask if you can make their photograph.

I feel it every time. Some days more than others, but it never fully goes away.

At events - folk gatherings, seasonal ceremonies, places where people have come specifically to participate in something - it’s easier. There is a natural openness that comes when people are in costume, or in ceremony, or simply in the mood to be part of something. They are already saying yes to the world in some way, and asking to photograph them feels like an extension of that. But quieter, more intimate moments are trickier. A solstice at dawn, say, where people have come to something personal and private. I’m always conscious of approaching those situations carefully, of reading whether someone wants to be seen or would rather be left alone. Getting that wrong feels like a much bigger transgression than a simple no.

My preparation helps. Wherever possible, I arrive early - not just to get a good position, but to get a feel for the space, the people, the atmosphere. I want to know the room before I start asking anything of it. I notice who seems open, who seems absorbed in their own experience, who catches my eye and holds it for a second longer than necessary. By the time I approach someone, I’ve usually been watching them for a while. Not in a way that I hope is unsettling - in the way that anyone does when they’re genuinely interested in another person.

The silent negotiation happens before any words are exchanged. Over time, I’ve learned to read body language in a way I couldn’t when I started - the quality of someone’s eye contact, whether a smile is an invitation or a deflection, the small signals that tell you someone is open before you’ve said a word. Sometimes, when someone is in exactly the right moment without even realising it - lost in a conversation, watching something unfold, simply present in a way that is completely unguarded - all it takes is a gesture of the camera and a raised eyebrow. A nod back, and that’s it. Those are often the best photographs. The ones where very little was asked because very little needed to be.

When I do approach, I always lead with a compliment. Something real, something I’ve actually noticed - their clothing, the way they were dancing, the expression on their face a moment ago, the way the light is falling on them. And I always explain what the photographs are for. Not commercial. Not for a client. Just documentary work, made out of genuine curiosity and love for what I’m witnessing. Most people, when they understand that, relax into it. Some light up. There is a particular kind of pleasure in being seen by someone who is genuinely interested in you, and I think people feel that even in a brief exchange on a street corner or a hillside.

The rejections sting. I won’t pretend otherwise. A simple no is fine - everyone is entitled to not want their photograph taken, and I respect that without exception. But occasionally someone says no in a way that is sharp or dismissive or contemptuous, and that is a different thing entirely. It knocks something loose in me. On those days, the camera usually goes away for a while. There is no point pushing through when your confidence has taken a hit like that - the photographs won’t be good anyway, because you’re not fully present. I’ve learned to recognise that and be kind to myself about it rather than forcing it.

On the harder days more generally - the ones where the anxiety is louder than usual - I give myself a pep talk. Sometimes a fairly lengthy one. I remind myself that most people are kind, that most people are flattered, that the worst that will happen is a no and that a no is survivable. And then I go and ask someone, and almost always they say yes, and almost always something in me settles. The first yes of the day is its own kind of relief.

What I’ve learned to do, wherever possible, is swap contact details afterwards. I want the people I photograph to have the images. It feels like the right thing - they’ve given me something, and I want to give something back. What I didn’t anticipate is where that habit would lead. Some of those exchanges have turned into something ongoing. I have people I first met through a camera who I now think of differently - not quite as subjects, not quite as friends, but as something in between. People whose faces I know in a particular way, because I was paying a particular kind of attention when we met.

The most full-circle example of this happened recently. I met a woman called Mimi at May Day at Cerne Abbas - photographed her with her friends, swapped details, sent her the images. Over a year later, we reconnected. She was working on a piece about folk culture in Dorset for Pier Journal, and she wanted to interview me. The person I had once pointed a camera at was now asking me the questions. I found that genuinely moving - the idea that a brief encounter, mediated by a camera, had quietly become something else over time.

That is what photographing strangers has taught me, more than anything. That the exchange is never really one-sided. You think you are taking something - an image, a moment, a fraction of a second of someone’s life. And you are. But they give you something back that is harder to name. A way of seeing. An encounter that might go nowhere or might, a year later, become an interview about the thing you both love. A reminder that most people, when approached with genuine curiosity and respect, will open up in ways that surprise you.

The anxiety hasn’t gone. I don’t think it will. But I’ve stopped waiting for it to disappear before I ask. I just take a breath, find something true to compliment, and go.

Both are about storytelling. Both are about people. And both, when they’re working properly, are about making someone feel something.

The thread that connects them most clearly for me is narrative. In PR - whether that’s a political campaign, a tourism brief, or a crisis communication - the job is always the same underneath: find the story that matters, work out who needs to hear it, and find the most compelling way to tell it. Photography asks exactly the same questions. What is actually happening here? What do I want the person looking at this image to understand or feel? What is the one detail, the one moment, that carries the whole thing? I’ve found that thinking in those terms behind a camera has sharpened my instincts in a meeting room, and vice versa. The discipline of one feeds the other.

Relationship building is another place where the two overlap completely. Good PR runs on trust - with journalists, with clients, with politicians, with the public. You are asking people to believe in something, and that requires them to believe in you first. Photography, particularly the kind I do, works the same way. I photograph strangers, communities, ceremonies - people who have no particular reason to let me in. The only way that works is if they trust me. The years I’ve spent building relationships in PR have given me a confidence with people that I carry directly into my photography. Walking into a room of strangers, reading the atmosphere, knowing when to speak and when to listen, understanding what someone needs before they’ve said it - those are PR skills as much as they are photography skills. I’m not sure I could separate them if I tried.

Observation is perhaps the most transferable thing of all. Good PR requires you to notice things - the detail in a briefing document that changes everything, the shift in a client’s tone that tells you something is wrong, the angle on a story that everyone else has missed. Photography has made me significantly better at this. It has trained me to slow down, to look properly, to pay attention to what is actually in front of me rather than what I expect to be there. And that observational quality - that habit of really looking - has fed back into my PR work in ways I didn’t anticipate. I notice more. I communicate more precisely. When I’m working with photographers on client campaigns, I brief better, because I understand what they’re trying to do and I have enough respect for their craft to let them do it. One of the most important things I’ve learned is that if you employ a photographer, you have to give them room to bring their own eye to the work. A photographer’s style is not an inconvenience - it’s the point.

The moment that crystallised all of this for me was a weekend at the Brean Country and Western Festival. We had commissioned Martin Parr to photograph it for our client Visit Brean - and I spent the weekend watching him work. It was, as I’ve written before, one of the most quietly educational experiences of my life. But what I’ve thought about since is how much of what I watched him do was instinctively familiar from PR. The way he read the room. The speed with which he built just enough rapport to get close. The precise editorial instinct that told him which moment mattered and which didn’t. These were not purely photographic skills. They were the skills of someone who understood people, story and audience - and happened to express that understanding through a camera. I left that weekend wanting to be a better photographer. I think it also made me a better PR professional, though I couldn’t have said exactly why at the time.

Perhaps the most unexpected crossover is in understanding what makes something land. In PR, you learn quickly that having a good story isn’t enough - you need to know the precise detail, the exact quote, the specific image that makes it stick. Not the general version of the thing, but the particular one. Photography has sharpened that instinct considerably. The difference between a photograph that works and one that doesn’t is almost always specificity - the detail that is so exact and so true that it opens something up rather than closing it down. I find myself applying that same test to press releases, to political messaging, to client pitches. Is this specific enough? Is this true enough? Does this land?

I don’t think you need to be a photographer to be a good PR professional, or to work in communications and politics. But I do think that learning to see - really see, in the way that photography demands - changes how you do almost everything else. It has certainly changed how I do mine.

The Tor has become a place I return to for moments that feel like they deserve it. I live about half an hour away, which makes it easy enough to visit on a whim, but I tend to save it for occasions that feel worth marking. My 30th birthday fell on Samhain - the Celtic New Year - and I spent part of it watching the sun rise up there. That visit was an entirely different thing: quieter, slower, more intentional. A handful of people rather than hundreds. The kind of atmosphere where you can actually hear the wind. Today was the opposite of that in almost every way, and somehow no less meaningful for it.

My dad and I set off up the White Spring path in the dark, just before 4am. I forget, every time, how hard that climb is. In daylight, rested and sensibly shod, it’s a decent walk. In the pitch black, on a hot and humid June night, legs still half-asleep, it is something else entirely. We sweated. We did not speak much. We kept going.

Today is also Father’s Day, which felt fitting in a way I didn’t entirely plan. There are worse ways to spend it than climbing a hill together in the dark to watch the sun come up.

Litha - the Summer Solstice, the longest day - is one of the eight festivals on the pagan Wheel of the Year, and one of the oldest marked moments in human history. The sun is at its strongest, the earth is lush, and what began stirring at Imbolc, emerging at Ostara, and roaring into life at Beltane is now fully, gloriously visible. In Wicca and modern neopaganism, the day is often portrayed as the moment when the Oak King, ruler of the waxing year, is defeated by the Holly King, ruler of the waning year - symbolising the shift from growing light to encroaching darkness. It is, paradoxically, the point at which the days begin to shorten again. The peak that is also the turning. That duality is part of what makes it worth marking.

Litha is considered an ideal time for solar magic - spells and intentions related to confidence, abundance, visibility, creativity and personal power. It marks the peak of the sun’s power, the triumph of light, and what many traditions consider the moment of ultimate earthly abundance - a highly spiritual time of year focused on energy, vitality, and gratitude for the fertility of nature. More practically, it is a time to be outside, to gather herbs at the height of their potency, to feast on seasonal food and to spend time with people you love in the longest light of the year. It invites reflection as well as revelry - a pause in the sunlight to take stock of what you’ve grown, and where you’re headed. That feels particularly resonant this year. It has been a hard one in a lot of ways - grief, change, the particular exhaustion of a life in transition - and there is something in the symbolism of the longest day that feels important to hold onto. The light is at its peak. Things are, quietly, growing. And perhaps most simply of all - for me, and I suspect for many others - it is a reminder that the sun will come up. However dark the hours before it, however long the climb, it always does. A prompt to stop, look around, and ask: what is actually here, right now, at its fullest? What deserves to be celebrated before the wheel turns again?

Glastonbury has always felt like the right place for it. The Tor, rising out of the Somerset Levels with its ruined tower at the top, has been a place of pilgrimage for centuries - long before the solstice crowds, long before the crystal shops on the high street. There is something about its shape - visible for miles, solitary, strange - that feels made for this. At Solstice, it earns that quality.

As we climbed, the path ahead was dotted with lights in the darkness - torches, phone screens, the occasional headtorch - swathes of people making the same pilgrimage upward, visible against the black hillside from a distance. The smell hit before anything else: incense, thick and sweet, and underneath it the unmistakeable drift of cannabis, both of which felt entirely in keeping with the occasion. Glastonbury does not pretend to be something it isn’t.

The crowd at the top was huge. Tightly packed, sociable, a genuine cross-section of people that I never quite stop finding moving at these events: families with young children and babies, couples, older people who have been doing this for decades, individuals alone with their thoughts, cyclists who made a slight detour, people in robes, people with their feet bare, people who had clearly come straight from a Saturday night out, and dogs - a surprising number of dogs, extraordinarily unbothered by the whole thing, which felt right somehow. Drums. The sound of drums is what I remember most - steady and insistent, the heartbeat of the hill. It was not quiet, exactly. But it was communal in the best sense, a shared union of people from all walks of life who had all, for different reasons, decided that being here at this hour mattered.

I won’t pretend I wasn’t also quietly anxious. Stonehenge and Avebury give you space to spread out, to position yourself, to find your angle. The Tor doesn’t. At the top, you are pressed in with several hundred other people on a relatively small summit, and getting a clear shot requires either extraordinary luck or extraordinary patience, often both. I had a low-level worry humming underneath the experience from the moment we arrived - am I in the right position, am I missing it, is that person’s head always going to be there - the kind of quiet pressure I put on myself at events like this and am, slowly, learning to ease off.

And then the sky began to lighten. It happens earlier than you expect and more gradually than you’d think - the whole area begins to glow well before the sun itself appears, the darkness retreating in stages, the horizon going from black to deep blue to something almost golden. The drums picked up. The crowd hushed, a little, and then seemed to hold its breath collectively. And then the sun came, a ball of fire lifting above the hills, clean and certain and frankly magnificent - and the Tor erupted. Whooping, cheering, people raising their arms, strangers turning to each other. It was joyful in the most unself-conscious way. That first glimpse is electric every time. It doesn’t matter how many solstices you’ve attended or how many photographs you’ve made of it. It does something to you.

The descent was its own experience. Queues of people winding back down the path, the sky now fully light, the Somerset Levels laid out below in the early morning. The mood was warm, a little euphoric - the particular happiness of a crowd that has done something together and felt it work. Not everyone was entirely steady on their feet. One man, slightly ahead of us, took a very dramatic tumble head first into a substantial patch of nettles. We are all human. He seemed, after a moment, to be fine.

I got home and looked at the photographs. I have a few I’m pleased with, which is more than enough. The Tor at Solstice is not the place for technically perfect images - it is the place for being present, for being part of something, for pointing a camera at the moment the sun arrives and hoping for the best. The lesson I keep relearning is that I need to be less hard on myself in those situations. I went, I was there, I made some photographs. That’s the whole thing.

Happy Solstice. Happy longest day. And, as it happens, happy Father’s Day to my dad - who climbed a hill with me at 4am without complaint, which feels like a reasonable definition of love.

This trip was different. I was there with my parents, my brother, and my niece - and it was her first time back since we lost her mum, Kate, at the end of last year. That mattered. Everything about the trip mattered a little more than usual, and somewhere in the first couple of days, I made a quiet decision - not entirely conscious, but real - to put the camera down and just be there.

Watching my niece experience Mallorca again - properly watching her, not through a viewfinder - turned out to be one of the loveliest things I’ve done in a long time. There is something about seeing somewhere you love through a child’s eyes, especially a child who is carrying something heavy. It makes the familiar feel sacred. I didn’t want to mediate that through a lens. I wanted to be in it with her.

I’ve written before about how photography is my respite - the thing that quiets my mind, the place I go when everything else feels like too much. What I’ve written about less is how much it takes from you at the same time. Being genuinely observant is energising and exhausting in equal measure. You are always switched on, always scanning, always half-assessing the light. It is a joy, and it is also a lot. This holiday, my mind simply decided it needed something different.

There were eagles - fairly common in Mallorca but they never stop being extraordinary, circling high above in that bright, certain sky. There was good food and warm evenings and interesting people and a pool and very little else. I didn’t once feel the pressure to make something of any of it. Knowing I’ll always go back helped. I didn’t feel like I was missing Mallorca. I felt like I was finally, fully in it.

It did feel strange at first. There’s an identity wrapped up in being a photographer, in being the person who notices things and records them. Putting the camera down felt a little like putting part of myself down too. My shoulders, on the other hand, were absolutely delighted - lugging a heavy camera around in 30-plus-degree heat, with the added complication of sun cream and sand, is not what anyone would call practical. But after a day or two, something loosened in a way that went beyond the physical. The holiday became what it was supposed to be: rest. Genuine, uncomplicated rest. And something else too - presence. The particular presence that comes when you stop trying to capture a moment and simply let yourself be inside it.

I came home ready. Summer Solstice at Glastonbury Tor is this Sunday - one of the great fixed points of my year - and I am itching to get there. The rest worked. The battery is charged.

The camera is coming to the Tor. I won’t be putting it down.

I’ve been photographing the British ritual calendar for a couple of years now - the ceremonies and customs and seasonal markers that punctuate the year in ways most people never notice. Stonehenge at the solstices. May Day at Cerne Abbas. The Horn Dance at Abbots Bromley. St George’s Day in Sidmouth. Each one a reminder that the relationship between people and the land they live on is older and stranger and more persistent than the modern world tends to acknowledge. So when Daylesford invited me to exhibit some of that work at their Soil and Supper evening, it felt like the most natural fit imaginable. An ode to the land, they called it. An evening shaped by the ancient devotion to season and shared ritual.

They weren’t wrong.

I’d been to Soil and Supper before - Daylesford commissioned me to photograph it last year, and that evening stayed with me. But this time, having my own work on the walls made it feel different. More personal. Turning through the Year - the exhibition - brought together photographs from across the ritual calendar: the solstices and equinoxes at Stonehenge, the spring equinox at Tower Hill, May Day at Cerne Abbas, the Horn Dance, St George’s Day. A year’s worth of turning up to things that most people have never heard of, with a camera and a genuine curiosity about what I’d find. To see those images in the context of an evening explicitly about our relationship with the land and the seasons - it felt, unexpectedly, like everything clicking into place.

The whole evening was in the hands of Kate Fox, Event Manager at the Bamford Collection and one of those rare people who curates an event so well you don’t notice the curation - it simply feels like the right things happening in the right order. One of the first things we did was make our own flower headcrowns and corsages with Daylesford’s florists - something that could easily have felt like dressing up, but didn’t. They felt entirely natural by the time we stepped outside. I had, wisely, swapped my vintage pumps for wellies before leaving the house.

As dusk fell, we walked the edges of the farm. Drinks in hand, accompanied by live folk music drifting across the fields, guided by Jez Taylor - Daylesford’s Head of the Market Garden - alongside Guy Hayward of the British Pilgrimage Trust. Jez spoke about the organic farm with a passion and knowledge that reminded you how much thought and care goes into what ends up on a plate. The crowd was sociable and warm, full of genuine appreciation for the earth and what it gives us. People connected with strangers. Conversations started easily, the way they do when everyone present is there for the same reason and knows it.

And then it started to rain. Softly, persistently. I will not pretend the women’s loos weren’t briefly abuzz afterwards - a flurry of hair and makeup and damp flower headcrowns - but what struck me was how quickly everyone settled back into it. The rain imposed a kind of forced naturalness on the evening that, in the end, added to everything rather than taking anything away. There is something about standing on working land in the rain, in the company of other people who have come specifically to pay attention to it, that connects you to something older than yourself. You feel the ground differently. You understand, in a way that is hard to articulate, why people have always marked these moments.

Part of the evening included a Mummers’ Play and a Beating of the Bounds - that ancient perambulation of a place’s edges, a ritual of attention and belonging that has its origins in pagan times, beginning as a way of awakening the sleeping crops in the spring before taking on a Christian form during Rogationtide. In the Middle Ages, clergy and parishioners would walk together from their church around the local area, carrying holy relics, stopping at landmarks to bless the fields and orchards and pray for good weather and a successful harvest. Before the Reformation these annual processions were considered important ceremonial affairs - Lords of the Manor, their bailiffs, reeves and stewards would all attend. The tradition nearly died out, as so many did. But it didn’t, quite. And walking the edges of Daylesford’s farm in the drizzle, folk music along side us, I could feel exactly why it survived. There is something in us that needs to mark the boundaries of the places we belong to. To say: this is here, and we are here, and we notice it.

At the centre of the mummers’ play was a story about organic gardening - the importance of our habitats, our food, and the ecosystems that sustain both. It felt entirely at home in that setting, in that company. The cast: Baron Barrenfield, played by Guy Hayward; Lady Land, played by Molly Pepper Steamson; and Green George, played by Jez - in full dedicated character, with the dry humour and total commitment that is entirely typical of him - dressed in a spectacular cape of leaves that was enormous, extraordinary, and completely of the land. Guy led us in song as we roamed around the boundary of the market garden, his voice carrying across the fields in a way that felt ancient and easy at once.

We stopped along the way to admire - and hug - a big oak tree. I am aware that tree hugging has a reputation. I understand the eye-rolls. But there is genuine science behind it: studies show that spending time around trees lowers cortisol, slows your heart rate, and boosts feelings of calm and connection. Trees release natural compounds called phytoncides that strengthen the immune system and lift mood - even just standing near them can have measurable effects. Standing with your arms around something that has been rooted in the same spot for centuries has a way of putting things in perspective. On a damp evening in the Cotswolds, in the company of people who had all come specifically to pay attention to the land, it felt like the most natural thing in the world.

There was poetry from , a film about wool - Why Wool Matters, commissioned by the Campaign for Wool - and a talk from Eddie Mordue about the ground beneath the flock. Richard Smith, Farms Director at Daylesford, spoke with the quiet conviction of someone who has spent a lifetime believing in what he does - honest food, transparency in the supply chain, and the vital role organic farming has to play in feeding a growing population sustainably. The kind of talk that makes you think differently about what’s on your plate, right before you sit down to eat it.

And the food. Slow-roast Daylesford lamb shoulder with tomato and mint dressing. Grilled courgette with feta. Fine bean and quinoa salad. Market garden strawberries with lemon curd and clotted cream. Simple, honest, extraordinary - the kind of food that reminds you what good ingredients, treated with respect, actually taste like. The menu card carried a quote from Thich Nhat Hanh at the bottom: “The bread in your hand is the body of the cosmos.” At Daylesford, on an evening like that one, it didn’t feel like a stretch. Ceili dancing and live folk music carried us to the end of the night.

This is what the ritual calendar does, at its best. It creates occasions for paying attention. For walking slowly through a place and thinking about what it is, what it gives, what we owe it. I have spent years turning up with a camera to these moments - the dawn gatherings and the torchlit processions and the ceremonies in fields that most people drive past without a second thought - and what strikes me every time is how much people need them. Not in a nostalgic way, not as a performance of heritage. But genuinely. Something in us responds to the marking of time, the acknowledgement of season, the act of being present in a place and saying: we know you’re here. We’re grateful.

The photographs on the walls of Daylesford that evening were made at moments exactly like that one. A year of turning up, paying attention, trying to make something true about what I found. I’m glad they found such a fitting home.

The rain helped.

I’m Livvi - a documentary photographer based in Somerset. Alongside the photography I work in politics and PR/communications, and run Daffodil PR with my mum. Photography is my respite from all of that, the thing that brings me back to myself - though I’m increasingly lucky that it’s also becoming part of my professional life too.

Life has been full lately, and if I’m honest, I haven’t been out with my camera as much as I’d like. I’ve been capturing mostly private moments - family, friends, the quiet domestic stuff - which has its own value. But I’m starting to get out and about a bit more again. And that, as it always does, is helping. There’s something about picking up a camera and going somewhere that resets everything else. I don’t think I’ll ever stop being grateful for that.

I’m close with my family, and lucky to have people around me who believe in what I do. The last year has been complicated in ways I won’t go into here, but what it’s reminded me of is how much that quiet love, support and encouragement matters - especially when giving it isn’t easy. Photography requires you to show up, to be present, to take risks - and it’s a lot easier to do all of that when you have people in your corner who make you feel like it’s worth it. More, I suspect, than those people will ever fully realise.

Some of the questions below came in via email, some via Instagram. I’ve tried to answer them as honestly as I can.

Which photographers inspire you?

Sian Davey, without question, sits at the top of that list. What moves me about her work is the storytelling underneath it - the way her subjects seem to lay themselves completely bare in front of her camera. That doesn’t happen by accident. Sian worked for fifteen years as a humanist Buddhist psychotherapist before she began her creative practice, and I think that’s everything. She brings a quality of attention to her subjects that goes far beyond photography. Her book The Garden was a huge influence on me and I still go back to it.

Martin Parr was a towering presence - I was lucky enough to spend a weekend with him early on in my photography journey, and watching him work a crowd was one of the most quietly educational experiences I’ve had. The Martin Parr Foundation in Bristol has been an important place for me too. We lost him last year and the photography world is still feeling it.

David Hurn I heard speak at the Foundation - his description of his work as non-fiction photography has stayed with me. That framing captures something I feel instinctively about the photographs I want to make.

There are too many to name, but some standouts: Abbie Trayler-Smith, John Boaz, Alice Zoo, Sophie Green, Chanel Irvine, Sam Alexander Gregg - all photographers whose work I admire and return to. I spend a lot of time looking at other people’s photography. It’s one of the most important things you can do.

Was there a moment that changed everything for you?

Yes, and I can pinpoint it fairly precisely. Early on in my photography journey, through a client at Daffodil PR, I was fortunate enough to commission Martin Parr to photograph the Brean Country and Western Festival. I spent the weekend watching him work - the way he moved through a crowd, the things he noticed, the unhurried precision of it. Most people there had no idea who he was. That invisibility was part of his method.

I started making my first portraits of strangers that weekend, nervous and uncertain and completely lit up by it. Something switched on. It hasn’t switched off since.

What are you working on at the moment?

The folk and ritual calendar work continues - it shapes my whole year. There’s always something on the horizon: a tradition to document, a ceremony happening in a field somewhere that most people have never heard of. I find that work endlessly rewarding because it gets me into communities I would never otherwise encounter.

I’ve also recently started The Archive of Ordinary Lives - an Instagram account built around a collection of rescued 35mm slides and photographic prints that very nearly ended up in a skip. They belonged to a couple called Ted and Vera, and they document sixty-odd years of ordinary life with an extraordinary eye. I’m digitising them slowly on my dad’s old film scanner and sharing them as I go. I’ve written about it in full on here if you want to know more.

And last year, I produced a Zine - Between Sun and Stone - which raised money for the Royal Marsden Cancer Charity, who supported my late sister-in-law Kate following her diagnosis. That project is close to my heart in ways that are hard to put into words.

Beyond all of that, I have a few other personal projects quietly taking shape - too early to say much about them yet, but they’re there. I’m also moving house at the end of the summer, and I plan to make some photographs of that process. There’s something about being in between places that feels worth documenting. Watch this space.

What advice would you give to someone starting out?

Shoot as much as you can, and try not to overthink it. The thinking comes later - first you need to make a lot of photographs and see what you’re drawn to. Don’t wait until you feel ready or until your kit feels good enough. Just go.

Spend real time getting to know your camera. Shoot in Manual. It feels counterintuitive at first and then it becomes second nature, and when it does, everything else opens up.

Follow photographers whose work you love, and look at it properly. Not scrolling - really looking. Go to exhibitions. Buy books. Sit with images.

And push yourself out of your comfort zone, regularly. The most interesting work tends to happen just past the edge of what feels comfortable.

Has photography changed how you see the world?

Completely. I’m more observant than I’ve ever been - more aware of light, of small details, of the things most people walk straight past. Even when I don’t have a camera with me, I carry that attention. It’s changed how I move through the world.

It’s also made me more open to people and their stories. More empathetic. When you spend a lot of time trying to make honest photographs of other people’s lives, you develop a genuine curiosity about them. I find I’m more interested in people than I’ve ever been, and I think photography is largely responsible for that. I should also say - it takes energy. Being hyper-observant to the world around you is wonderful and also, genuinely exhausting. I’ve learned to be kind to myself about that.

Where would you love to travel and photograph?

More of Mallorca - I know it well but there’s always more to find, and the light there does something to me. More European traditions and rituals too - I’m particularly drawn to Portugal, and to Venice for the carnival. Morocco has been on my mind for a long time. And India. Colour is something I’m increasingly drawn to - the saturation and chaos of it, the way it can make an image feel completely alive. Places where life is lived visibly and communally. That’s where I want to be.

Film or digital?

Both - but mostly digital, because film feels higher risk and I’m still getting to grips with it. There’s something about not knowing what you’ve got, not being able to check the back of the camera, that I find genuinely challenging. But that’s also exactly why I’m shooting more of it. Film forces you to let go a little - to commit to the moment and trust yourself - and I think that’s good for me. Watch this space.

How do you approach photographing strangers?

This is something I think about a lot, and feel strongly about. Respect is everything. I always start with a conversation - I’ll find something to genuinely compliment, something I’ve noticed about the person or what they’re doing. I want people to feel comfortable before a camera is anywhere near them.

I’ll also be honest: when I’m not feeling on form, approaching strangers is genuinely hard. The possibility of rejection feels much heavier on those days. Photographing strangers is one of the most energising things I do - and also one of the most energy-sapping. It requires a lot of presence, a lot of openness, and on the days when I don’t have much of either to give, I don’t force it.

On those days I take my camera out anyway - on a walk, into normal life - but without the pressure of having to capture something extraordinary. Just making images. Staying in the habit. That matters too.

Thanks for reading, and for the questions that prompted all of this. Writing it has reminded me how much I love what I do - even in the quieter periods, even when life gets in the way. Photography has given me so much: communities I'd never have found, people I'd never have met, a reason to keep showing up and paying attention. I hope something in here was useful, or at least interesting. As always, I'm glad you're here.

Got a question I haven’t answered here? Drop it in the comments - I’m always happy to keep the conversation going.

A family member of mine is an estate agent, and when he mentioned he was clearing a house and could use an extra pair of hands, I said yes without thinking much about it. I’d had some time off work and needed something to do with it - somewhere to be, something useful. The family of the woman who had lived there had already come and gone. A local charity had been and taken what they could sell. My job, such as it was, was to help with what remained.

What remained was a life. Hundreds of greetings cards. Wedding invitations. A rose, preserved carefully in a box. The accumulated evidence of a home of collectors - people who kept things because things mattered to them, and who couldn’t have known that one day the keeping of them would fall to strangers. Sentimental things. The kind that are everything to the people who hold onto them and become, in their absence, impossible to know what to do with.

And then, in among it all, boxes and boxes of 35mm slides and photographic prints. Meticulously organised. Carefully labelled. Spanning decades.

I asked what the plan was for them. The answer was gentle but clear: the family had been, the charity had come to collect anything they could sell to raise money, and whatever was left would likely go in the skip. Anything of value had already gone. Which begs the question, really, of what we mean by value. These slides will never fetch anything at auction. They have no monetary worth to speak of. But sitting on my kitchen table, holding them up to the light one by one - I’d challenge anyone to argue they aren’t amongst the most valuable things in that house.

The house felt warm. That’s the thing I keep coming back to. It felt like the home of my late grandparents - full of love and memories and comfort, the particular atmosphere of a place that has been properly lived in by people who cared about it. Moving through the rooms, you could feel the shape of two lives. The collections they’d kept, the things they’d chosen to hold onto, the care visible in every corner. It was the home of people who noticed things and thought them worth preserving. I felt, unexpectedly, completely at home.

I should say something about the family, because I don't want this to read as any kind of judgement. Grief and practicality are a brutal combination, and clearing a loved one's home is one of the hardest things there is. You cannot keep everything - I know that better than most right now, in the middle of my own clear out, preparing to move house, making the same impossible decisions about what stays and what goes. The family took what they could. That's all any of us can do. I just hope that the photographs ending up with me feels like something good coming out of something hard. That's all it is. Because they are extraordinary.

The collection documents ordinary life across roughly six decades - from the 1960s through to the 1990s, with some prints going back even further. Family gatherings. Holidays. Landscapes. Entry after entry into local flower shows and village fetes. And then the thing that really stopped me: an extensive record of European travel. Morocco. Gibraltar. Athens. Mallorca. All of it shot with obvious care and curiosity, all of it labelled in that same neat, consistent hand. These weren’t casual snapshots. They were a life’s work of looking.

I’m digitising them on my dad’s old film scanner, slowly and carefully. Most are on Kodak cardboard mounts - the classic kind, small and slightly faded - but many are on glass, which is older still and requires a different kind of handling. Before each one goes through the scanner, I hold it up to the light. That moment - that initial hold up to the light with no idea what I’m about to see - is quietly magical. A horse and cart on a sun-bleached street in Soller. Women shopping in Palma, dressed in the fashion of another era entirely. Family groups in gardens, squinting into the sun, completely unaware they’d one day be looked at by a stranger in Somerset. Each slide is a revelation. I never know what I’m going to find.

I’m not certain who took them all - I think many were Ted’s, but I don’t believe all the photographs were made by the same person. What I do know is that the collection belonged to a couple. Ted and Vera. Their names appear throughout - on labels, in the images themselves, in the story the photographs tell. Ted passed away a few years ago. Vera passed away very recently. And though I never met either of them, when I heard she had gone, I felt sad. Genuinely sad. Because by that point I had spent hours in their home, carefully sorting through their belongings, and you cannot do that without beginning to know someone. Their interests, their humour, the extraordinary care they took with things. How much they clearly loved their family and friends.

But there is so much I don’t know. I don’t know what their jobs were, or how they met, or whether they had children. I don’t know who taught them to travel so adventurously, or what it felt like to stand in a souk in Morocco in the 1960s with a camera. I don’t know the names of the people in the family photographs, or what became of them. The gaps in the story are part of the story, and I find I’m sitting with them rather than trying to fill them. Some things you don’t get to know. What you have is what’s in the frame.

I’ve written before about why I photograph what I photograph. I’m drawn to communities I would never otherwise encounter - folk traditions, seasonal rituals, the ceremonies that happen in fields and village halls and on seafronts that most people never hear about. Photography, for me, is a way in. A means of access. I turn up with a camera and I am welcomed into worlds that would otherwise remain invisible to me, and I try to make something true about what I find there. What I hadn’t expected was that the same thing could happen in reverse - that I could find myself holding the work of someone I will never meet, looking at the world through their eyes, being let into their life through the photographs they left behind. Ted and Vera’s collection has given me exactly that. A way in. A world I would never otherwise have seen.

The box labelled Mallorca is the one I keep coming back to. It’s a place I love, somewhere I return to and know in that particular way you know somewhere you keep choosing. But these slides show a Mallorca I’ve never seen - early in its life as a holiday destination, before it became what it is now, still finding its shape. The horse and cart in Soller. The women in Palma, unhurried, shopping in the heat. To see it through someone else’s eyes, sixty years ago, is an almost indecent privilege. That is what photography does at its best. It loans you someone else’s attention. You borrow their curiosity, their particular way of standing in front of something and deciding it was worth keeping. Moments in history that would have been entirely unknown, entirely gone, were it not for a camera and the care to use it well.

I’ve said before that a photograph made by a human who was really there carries something that no generated image ever can. The fact of presence. The decision to look. Ted and Vera’s collection is proof of that in the purest possible form. Every slide is evidence that someone stood somewhere, at a particular moment that will never come again, and thought: this is worth keeping.

Think about how much is lost every single day. Homes are cleared, skips fill up, and with them go the evidence of lives - the photographs that nobody thought to rescue, the slides that never found their way to a scanner, the prints that ended up in landfill alongside the greetings cards and the wedding invitations and the roses kept in boxes. It happens constantly, invisibly, and most of the time nobody knows what’s gone. The ordinary lives of ordinary people - the holidays and the flower shows and the family Christmases and the European adventures - vanishing without trace because the people who loved them are no longer here to insist on their value.

Ted and Vera are strangers to me. I never met them, never will. But I care about their lives. I care about what they saw and where they went and the care they took to preserve it. And I think that matters - not just as an act of archiving, but as a reminder that someone always cares. That the ordinary moments of ordinary lives are worth something to someone, even if that someone is a stranger with a film scanner and an Instagram account, sitting in Somerset sixty years later, holding a glass slide up to the light.

I started The Archive of Ordinary Lives to give Ted and Vera’s photographs a home. I intend to grow it - to acquire more slides and prints over time, to give more rescued collections somewhere to be seen. I’ll take the same approach they took: slowly, carefully, with love and proper attention. These images have waited long enough.

The skip was on the drive. The boxes are on my shelf. Ted and Vera went to Mallorca, and grew roses, and kept every card anyone ever sent them, and looked at the world with curiosity and care.

They deserve to be seen.

Follow The Archive of Ordinary Lives on Instagram here: https://www.instagram.com/archiveofordinarylives/

About fifteen years ago, I studied photography at college. Except I didn’t, not really. What I mostly did was learn Photoshop. The course was heavy on post-production and light on everything else - how a camera actually works, how light behaves, how to stand in front of something and decide what matters. I came away knowing my way around a few editing tools and not a great deal else. I liked photography. I just hadn’t learned it.

After college I got a job, got a life, got busy. I had a Nikon DSLR that came out for holidays and the occasional event, but honestly? It mainly lived on a shelf. I was snapping, not shooting. There’s a difference, and at the time I didn’t know that yet.

Lockdown is a strange thing to feel grateful for. But I am, a bit. Everything stopped, and in the stopping, I started going for long walks - the aimless kind, the kind you take when walking is the only thing you’re allowed to do. I took the camera, and for the first time in years (maybe ever) I actually looked. At light. At how it moves through a hedgerow in the late afternoon. At the particular quality of a March morning before anyone else is up. I was shooting nature, the lanes near my house, plants - anything that caught my eye. But something else happened too - quieter, and more unexpected. I started photographing my family on my phone. Standing in the garden, socially distanced, keeping two metres from each other. The awkwardness of it. The love underneath the awkwardness. I didn’t know it then, but that was the moment I understood what photographs are actually for. Not to document. To hold. To keep something that would otherwise be gone.

Around then I bought a Canon 5D Mark IV, and that was it. I was done for. I love the weight of a camera - the heft of it, the seriousness - even when my shoulders are less enthusiastic. I switched to shooting in Manual and found, to my surprise, that I loved figuring out why. My brain needed something to get its teeth into, and here it was. It was good for me in a way I hadn’t seen coming. Getting out, paying attention, coming home with something - it turned out to be exactly what I needed.

I did a course with the Royal Photographic Society and the Open University, run through FutureLearn, all about finding your genre and developing your style. That’s when it started to go deeper. Not just the technical stuff, but the thinking underneath it. The part that stayed with me most was around intent - what the photograph is actually for, what you are trying to say, and to whom. The course asked you to write a Statement of Intent for your portfolio. It sounds like a dry exercise; it wasn’t. It forced me to articulate something I hadn’t been able to put into words before. I started making portraits. Not photographing people - making portraits of them. The distinction matters. There’s trust involved, and a whole conversation that happens before the shutter is pressed, and I found I wanted to be inside that conversation.

The moment that really broke something open was a weekend at the Brean Country and Western Festival. A client at Daffodil PR, the PR agency I run with my mum, had commissioned Martin Parr to cover it, and I spent the weekend watching him work. Just watching. The way he read a room. What he noticed, what he walked straight past, the unhurried precision of it. Most people there had no idea who he was - they saw an older man with a camera, there for a hobby. That invisibility was part of his method. He could get extraordinarily close, a flash and a wide lens right in people’s faces, and they’d barely register it. I watched him set up portraits too - quickly, but with a kind of quiet thoughtfulness. I started making my first portraits of strangers that weekend, nervous and uncertain and absolutely lit up by it. Something switched on. It hasn’t switched off since.

Running my own business has meant I am exceptionally lucky - photography has crept into my working life as well as my personal one, and the two have become increasingly hard to separate. Alongside the personal projects that shape my year, I get to pick up a camera for work too. It still feels like a privilege every time.

The Martin Parr Foundation in Bristol became somewhere I returned to again and again. I went for talks and sat in the dark listening to photographers speak about their work with an honesty that floored me. I heard Sian Davey talk about The Garden - her photographs of her daughter Alice, made with such intimacy - and I bought the book and read it slowly and thought about it for weeks. I heard Chris Hoare talk about Seven Hills. I heard David Hurn describe his work as non-fiction photography, a phrase that landed somewhere important for me, because it named the thing I was instinctively drawn to: the world as it is, witnessed by someone who is genuinely curious about it. I began to understand that the photographs I admired weren’t admirable because they were beautiful. They were admirable because they were true. The Foundation he built feels more precious now, after losing Martin last year. It was a loss the whole photography world is still sitting with.

I did the Spring Intensive with The Emmas - Sian Davey, Abi Trayler-Smith, Clementine Schneidermann, Alice Zoo and Alys Tomlinson. Five photographers whose work I loved, in a room together, and me trying to keep up. Each session we were given a single word and asked to go and shoot around it. It sounds simple. It’s not. What it did was show me my own thinking - the images I was instinctively drawn to, the way my eye moved, what I kept returning to. The mentorship was invaluable, but so was something harder to name: the community of other photographers on the course, all of us at different stages, all working out the same things. What I took away most was the understanding that the photography begins long before the camera comes out. All the noticing, the sitting with something, the working out what you actually feel about it - that’s part of it too. The shutter is almost the last thing.

What I photograph now is mainly centred around the ritual year - folk traditions, seasonal celebrations, the ceremonies and customs that most people have never heard of and that happen in fields and town squares and village halls all over this country every single weekend. I love what photography lets me do: walk into a community I would never otherwise encounter, be welcomed, pay attention, try to make something true about what I find there. It is a way of accessing the world. It opens doors that would otherwise stay closed.

I think about the version of me at college, dutifully learning Photoshop and never once asking what a photograph was actually for. She wasn’t wrong to be there. She just hadn’t found the right question yet.

And here is the thing about the gap, the fifteen years on the shelf. I don’t regret it. Photography is something you have to feel, and be ready for. I never pick up my camera because I feel I have to. I pick it up because I want to, badly, the way you want something that has become necessary. My love for it has never felt forced or obligatory. It just took a global pandemic, a new camera, and a weekend watching a genius work a crowd to show me that.

I’m not complaining.

This year I came for the Green Man parade on 1st May, and couldn’t stay for the full day’s celebrations - life, as ever, had other ideas. But even a partial Beltane in Glastonbury is something. You don’t leave unchanged.

Beltane is one of the eight festivals on the pagan Wheel of the Year, falling midway between the spring equinox and the summer solstice. The Celts celebrated it as the first day of summer - a fire festival, a fertility rite, a moment to mark the world waking back up after the long cold. Two thousand years on, in a small Somerset town that has always done things slightly differently, the tradition is very much alive. Thousands of people gather throughout the day. Locals and visitors greet the sunrise from the Tor in a Druidic ceremony, then head to Chalice Well to jump over the Beltane fire. Later in the morning they gather in the town’s centre, joining with drummers, Morris dancers, the Greenmen and other groups - led by the Greenmen bearing the maypole, they process to the White Spring, then up to Bushy Combe where the maypole is erected in a hole dug by women of the community the day before. The May King and Queen are hand-fasted, mead is consumed, the maypole is danced around, and everyone ends up tired and happy.

I was there for the parade into town - the part where it all moves through the High Street and the thing really comes alive. The Green Men lead it, their faces and bodies covered in extraordinary costumes of leaves and foliage, wild and pagan and magnificent. Behind them come the drummers, the Morris dancers, the robed figures, the stilt walkers, ordinary people in extraordinary clothes - flower crowns, cloaks, painted faces, ribbons - and others who have simply stepped off the pavement and joined in, because Glastonbury is a place where that feels like the only natural response. The celebrations include Morris dancers, stilt walkers, poetry and music performances, singing, dancing around the maypole and a big parade up the High Street. There is a quality to the noise that is hard to describe - the drums at the centre of it all, steady and insistent, and around them voices and instruments and the sound of feet on the road.

What strikes me every time, and struck me again this year, is the costumes. People have clearly spent months on them. There are headdresses trailing flowers and ivy, cloaks painted with symbols, faces transformed with elaborate make-up. There are children dressed as woodland creatures, teenagers in full Druidic robes, older people who look as though they have been doing this for decades - because many of them have. Last year, in 2024, I watched a woman in an extraordinary green gown process through the Market Cross with the kind of calm authority that suggested she had been the May Queen approximately fourteen times. The whole thing has the atmosphere of a gathering rather than a performance. Everyone here belongs to it, in one way or another.

The full day’s celebrations run from around 4:30am on the Tor through to evening, blending the sacred and the surreal - maypoles, morris men, Beltane fire and ceremony. I couldn’t stay for all of it this year, which I regret, though there is also something to be said for leaving wanting more. The part I did see - the parade coming through town, the drums, the Green Men moving through the crowd - was more than enough to feel the thing that Beltane in Glastonbury always gives you, which is a sense of the year turning beneath your feet. The light is different in May. The air is different. The world is, genuinely, waking back up. Here, unlike almost anywhere else I know, people stop and mark that. They come out in their thousands and they make noise and they wear flowers in their hair and they carry a maypole through the streets, and it feels neither silly nor marginal. It feels necessary.

Glastonbury is easy to caricature, and I know people who roll their eyes at it. I understand the impulse. But what I see when I come here - what I keep coming back to photograph - is a community that has preserved its relationship with the ritual calendar in a way that most of England has long since lost. It didn’t used to be unusual, any of this. The Celts celebrated Beltane as the first day of summer, calling it Beltane, which most likely translates as bright fire. Two thousand years ago it was a fire festival with rituals to encourage the fertility of cattle, crops and people. Towns and villages across the country would have marked it. Most stopped. Glastonbury didn’t.

I’ll be back next year. And this time, I’m staying for the maypole.

That is the thing about photography that people who don’t do it sometimes struggle to understand. It isn’t just about the images. It is about what happens to you when you are making them. You become more observant. You start to notice the way light falls across a street at a particular time of day, the expression that crosses someone’s face for half a second before it disappears, the details that most people walk straight past. The camera gives you permission to slow down and pay attention. Over time, even when you don’t have a camera with you, you carry that attention with you. It changes how you move through the world.

I went to a talk at the Martin Parr Foundation a while ago - I have been a regular visitor since it opened in Bristol, and it has become one of my favourite places to think about photography and to be genuinely moved by it. (The loss of Martin last year was a blow to the photography world that is still being felt, and the Foundation he built feels more precious for it). David Hurn was speaking, the great Magnum photographer, and he said something that has been sitting with me ever since. He described his work as non-fiction photography. Not documentary. Not reportage. Non-fiction. The distinction sounds small but it isn’t. Non-fiction is the category that contains all of it - the impulse to witness the world as it actually is, without staging or fabrication, driven by a genuine curiosity about real people and real lives. All tutees at his famous School of Documentary Photography in Newport, he has said, had two things in common: a non-fiction curiosity about the world, and the sense that photography was a joyful way of having a profession. That framing - non-fiction curiosity - felt like a way of describing something I recognised in myself but hadn’t quite found the words for. The photographs I am drawn to making, and the photographs I am drawn to looking at, share that quality. They are made by people who are genuinely interested in what is in front of them.

I adore looking at other photographers’ work. Properly looking - not scrolling past it on a phone, but sitting with it, going to exhibitions, buying books, spending time with individual images and letting them do what good photographs do, which is open up. Galleries are wonderful for this - if you are ever in London and looking for inspiration, The Photographers’ Gallery is somewhere I recommend without hesitation. The best photographs are not immediately legible. They give you something different the second time, and the third. They contain more than they appear to contain. Spending time with the work of photographers I admire - whether that is Hurn, or Sian Davey, or any number of others - is a kind of education that I don’t think ever really ends. You keep learning to see.

And then there is the memory question, which feels more personal. Photographs hold time in a way that nothing else quite manages. I look at an image and I am back there - not just remembering it, but feeling it, the temperature of the air, the sound underneath the frame, the particular quality of the moment. That is an extraordinary thing for an object to be able to do, and it cuts both ways. For example, I have photographs from a trip to Kew Gardens last year that I can’t quite bring myself to look at yet - they take me straight back there in a way that catches in the chest. But they are there, and one day I know I will be grateful for them. I also have so many photographs of my late sister-in-law, who was a photographer herself. Those feel precious beyond words. In a year like this one has been, when grief has a way of collapsing time and making the past feel very present, I have found myself thinking about all of this a lot. The photographs I have made over the years are a kind of record of a self who was there and paying attention. They are also, honestly, some of what I am holding onto.

I am aware that talking about photography right now requires some acknowledgement of the moment we are in. Artificial intelligence can generate images - increasingly convincing, increasingly sophisticated images - of things that never happened, people who don’t exist, places that were never visited. There are real questions to be asked about what that means, and I don’t want to be glib about it. But I find myself unmoved by the idea that photography is therefore finished or obsolete. A photograph made by a human who was really there, who chose to be in that place at that time, who pressed the shutter at that particular moment and not a second before or after, carries something that a generated image simply cannot carry. It carries the fact of presence. It carries the decision. It carries the non-fiction curiosity of the person behind the camera. That is not a romantic notion - it is just true. You can feel it when you look at photographs made by people who were genuinely there and genuinely interested. You cannot replicate it by asking a machine to imagine it.

Photography will be fine. More than fine. If anything, the rise of AI seems to me to be clarifying something about what photographs are actually for - not to illustrate a reality that could just as easily be invented, but to witness one that actually exists. There is a world out there full of rituals and communities and quiet extraordinary moments that most people never see. Somebody has to go and look. Somebody has to force themselves out of the house.

That is what I keep doing. It is, at the moment, a great deal of what is keeping me going.

What is certain is that every year, at the turn of May, Minehead becomes briefly and gloriously strange. From Warning Night on April 30th through to the evening of May 3rd, the town’s three hobby horses - the Original Sailor’s Horse, the Traditional Sailor’s Horse, and the Town Horse - take to the streets. They are extraordinary objects: boat-shaped wooden frames carried on a dancer’s shoulders, draped in painted cloth covered in bright roundels, ribbons running along the top, a long tail trailing behind. The carrier’s face is hidden behind a mask beneath a tall pointed hat. They are not quite like anything else in English folk tradition.

The four days follow their own quiet logic. Warning Night is an awakening, a short outing to prepare the town for what’s coming. May Day itself is the great event, beginning at the quay at dawn and ending at Dunster Castle by evening. May 2nd sees the horses roaming through town, dancing with whoever they find. And then comes May 4th. Bootie Night. The finale.

This year, I came for the finale.

By the time the horses gather to travel up Blenheim Road, the crowd is already thick. There are no official road closures - this is a tradition that predates such things, and it moves through the town on its own terms. Vehicles simply stop. Some drivers put their hazard lights on and get out to watch. Others sit in their cars behind an impromptu queue, craning to see what’s going on. The road belongs, for now, to the horses.

The atmosphere is loud and pressing and warm. Children are everywhere, shrieking with a particular mixture of delight and genuine alarm as the horses move through the crowd, skirts swinging, tails lashing. The squealing carries above the drums and the melodeons, above the accordion players keeping up the relentless rhythm of the Hobby Horse tune - a version of “Hey Joe, the Boat is Tipping Over” - that has been playing, in various forms, for as long as anyone can remember. Adults laugh. Small children dart behind their parents’ legs and then edge forward again, unable to quite stay away.

Underneath each horse, the carriers swap out regularly, one person taking over from another in a surprisingly fluid handover, the great painted frame barely missing a beat. It is harder work than it looks - the structure is heavy, the dancing demanding, and the procession covers ground through the town for a couple of hours. Watching the changeovers happen, the seamless passing of the horse from one set of shoulders to another, is one of the small quiet pleasures of the evening. The horse continues. The person underneath changes. The tradition holds.

This is, depending on how you count it, one of the oldest continuously observed folk customs in England. It has survived the Reformation, two world wars, and the slow erosion of rural tradition that claimed so many customs like it across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. During the First World War, when the adult carriers were away, local children made their own version of the horse and kept it going. That detail has stayed with me - the idea of children carrying the weight of a tradition because the adults couldn’t, unwilling to let the horse simply stop.

Minehead is not Padstow. It doesn’t have the same crowds or the same level of national attention, and there are people here, I think, who prefer it that way. This feels like something done for the town, by the town. The Rotary club helps manage the traffic. The RNLI collection tins go round. Local families line the streets three or four deep. Visitors are welcome, but they are guests. The horse belongs to Minehead.

Standing in the crowd on Bootie Night, watching the last ceremony of the season play out against the sound of drums and the squealing of children and the steady stop-start movement of headlights queued along the road, I kept thinking about continuity. About what it means to keep something alive not because it is useful or profitable or particularly legible to the outside world, but because it is yours, and it matters, and the alternative is to let it disappear. The wheel keeps turning. The horse keeps dancing. Roll on next year.

This is St George’s Day in Sidmouth. And it is, in the very best sense, completely mad.

There is a paradox at the heart of England’s national day. St George was almost certainly born in what is now Turkey, never visited England, and probably never slew a dragon. His feast day, April 23rd, passes largely unremarked across most of the country: no bank holiday, no great civic ceremony, nothing to match the Scottish New Year or the Irish patron saint’s day that stops cities in their tracks. And yet in Sidmouth, a town of around 13,000 people nestled between red sandstone cliffs on the East Devon coast, it is something genuinely extraordinary: loud, colourful, participatory, rooted in community.

At the heart of it all are the Sidmouth Giants, two towering processional figures named Prince George and Princess Sabra, built and operated by Sid Vale Community Productions (SVCP). They are carried on the heads and shoulders of volunteer porters and accompanied by catchers standing ready in case they wobble. The tradition of processional giants is older than most people realise: it was once common across England until Henry VIII suppressed it as Catholic frippery. The custom survived in mainland Europe, became more secular, and was gradually revived in Britain from the 1980s onwards. Sidmouth’s giants carry all the strange deep resonance of something returning home after centuries away.

Processing alongside them are the Sidmouth Steppers, a ladies’ North West Morris side formed in 1998 in the wake of the Sidmouth International Folk Festival. It’s a tradition worth knowing about, quite distinct from the Cotswold style most people associate with Morris dancing. Where Cotswold is all white handkerchiefs and flowery hats, North West is louder, more percussive, more industrial in its roots. The dances originated in the mill towns of northern England; clogs are worn because that’s what mill workers wore. There is something quietly moving about a group of women from a Devon seaside town keeping alive a tradition born in the cotton mills of Lancashire, practising every Tuesday evening and dancing out through the summer months on the esplanade. On St George’s Day they are joined by Otter Morris, a Border Morris side whose style offers a vivid contrast - darker, more ritualistic - and the two sides together show just how much range the tradition holds.

Then there’s the mummers’ play: a wonderfully chaotic piece of folk theatre in which St George battles a fire-breathing dragon (the dragon actually breathes fire) to save Princess Sabra. The audience clusters around wherever the action moves through town, and people do genuinely gasp. One bystander at a recent performance described hearing the crowd react to the dragon and immediately signing up to join SVCP on the spot. The chair of SVCP, Barry Morton - mummer, giant porter, and clearly a man who gives a great deal of himself to all of this - has said that St George’s Day is part of England’s intangible cultural heritage, and that the joy of Sidmouth is how many different groups work together to keep it alive.

None of this happens in a vacuum. Sidmouth is one of the most folk-saturated towns in England, and its relationship with the traditional calendar runs all the way through the year. But the great fixed point, one of the fixed points in the entire English folk calendar, is the Sidmouth Folk Festival, held in the first week of August every year since 1955. Founded as a folk dance festival by the English Folk Dance and Song Society, it has grown over seven decades into something vast: over 700 events in a single week, tens of thousands of visitors, concerts and ceilidhs and pub sessions and workshops and children’s activities spread across the town. It has come close to folding. In the mid-2000s it nearly didn’t survive, but the grass-roots folk community refused to let it die. It ends each year with a torchlight procession down the esplanade and fireworks over the sea. Its patron is Martin Carthy. It has a Blue Plaque.

England has a complicated relationship with its own national identity, and St George’s Day can make people uncomfortable, too easily co-opted, the argument goes, by something narrow and exclusionary. What Sidmouth offers is something else entirely: a St George’s Day rooted not in flag-waving but in community, craft, physical skill and shared joy. The giants were made by volunteers from recycled materials. The Steppers practise at the Guide Hut on Lawn Vista. The mummers’ play is performed and passed on by ordinary people who simply love it.

An eight-year-old sees it and thinks: I want to be part of this. Twenty years later, he’s playing St George. That feels like the point.

The next Sidmouth Folk Festival runs 31 July - 7 August 2026. sidmouthfolkfestival.co.uk.

That’s not a coincidence.

There’s a version of Mallorca that exists for roughly six weeks in spring, before the charter flights begin stacking up over Palma airport and the beaches fill with sunbeds. It’s quieter, cooler, and for anyone with a camera, almost unfairly beautiful. Add Holy Week into the equation and you have something that goes well beyond a pleasant holiday. You have a reason to go.

Let me make the case.

Anyone who has photographed the Mediterranean in July knows the problem. The midday sun is brutal, flat, and merciless. Shadows go hard and black. Skin blows out. The beautiful old stone of a village church becomes a featureless white wall. In April, you get something closer to a gift. The sun is lower in the sky, the light stays golden for longer in the morning and evening, and there’s often a thin layer of haze or cloud that diffuses everything into something soft and workable. You can shoot at 11am without everything looking like a forensic photograph.

The colours also come alive differently. Bougainvillea is already out but not yet exhausted. Almond blossom is giving way to new leaves. The hills behind Sóller are still green rather than the parched ochre of August. Everything has a freshness to it, the visual equivalent of a taken breath.

Shoulder season also means the island is still, in some meaningful sense, Mallorcan. The cafés in Palma’s Plaça Major have locals in them. The narrow streets of Valldemossa are walkable without being navigated. The port at Pollença is quiet enough that you can hear the water. For photography, this matters enormously. The human elements in your frame are more varied, more real, less performative.

Street photography in a tourist town in high summer is a strange exercise. Everyone is already performing, already conscious of the camera, already in the heightened state of being on holiday. In April, people are just living. The man reading his newspaper outside a bar in Sineu. The woman hanging washing from a wrought-iron balcony in Alcúdia. The fisherman at the harbour who hasn’t looked up yet. These are the shots you can’t manufacture. The absence of crowds also means easier access to cathedral interiors and chapels without tour groups filling the frame, the ability to stop where the light is good rather than where the car park is, and accommodation in the old town rather than a resort complex twenty minutes out.

Then there’s Holy Week, which is the real reason to go in April.

Setmana Santa is one of the oldest and most visually dramatic religious observances in Spain, and Mallorca takes it seriously. Each night from Palm Sunday through Good Friday, processions move through the streets of towns across the island - Palma, Pollença, Sineu, Felanitx - and they are extraordinary. The penitents, members of religious brotherhoods, walk in long robes and tall conical hoods, carrying candles and wooden crosses. Floats bearing devotional scenes are shouldered through cobbled streets to the sound of drums and brass. The whole thing unfolds by candlelight, in streets that haven’t changed much in 400 years.

As a photographic subject, it’s almost overwhelming. The challenge - and this is what makes it genuinely interesting rather than just spectacular - is that you begin in the last of the evening light and chase it as it fades, working with moving subjects in streets so narrow the crowds leave you almost no room to plant your feet, let alone find a composition. Prime lenses, which I almost always shoot with, make this harder still; you can’t zoom your way out of a bad position, you have to move, and in that crush, moving is its own problem. For some of the processions I also had a 75-300mm with me, which gave reach but demanded a steadiness that tired arms and low light don’t always allow. And you’re doing all of this in the middle of something that isn’t a performance. These are people marking something real, and you feel that in your photographs if you let it in.

The best frames I took during Holy Week weren’t the wide establishing shots, though those have their place, but the quieter ones - the frames that arrived rather than were taken. A young girl in penitent robes, standing beneath an ornate float, looking up with an expression caught somewhere between boredom and wonder. Two women in traditional mantillas, dressed in black, holding red carnations, pausing long enough to let you photograph them. An older woman in a side street, her face completely still, the graffiti on the shutter behind her making the most unlikely backdrop for something that felt genuinely dignified. These aren’t photographs you plan; they’re what happens when you stop trying to document the event and start paying attention to everything happening around it.

A few practical notes for anyone planning a similar trip. Go to the smaller towns as well as Palma. Stay for the full week if you can, because each night is different in character; Palm Sunday has a brightness to it, Good Friday is the most intense, and a weekend alone won’t give you the gradation. Bring a fast prime - a 35mm or 50mm at f/1.4 or f/1.8 is the right tool for candlelit processions; a zoom is fine during the day, but at night you want every photon you can get. And respect the event. These are acts of faith, not performances. Don’t use flash, don’t push to the front, don’t treat participants as props. The best photographs from events like this come from patience and proximity over time, not from forcing your way to a vantage point.

Holy Week doesn’t occupy the entire day, and in between, Mallorca in April is its own reward. The road from Palma to Valldemossa in the early morning, with mist still sitting in the valleys and the light catching the limestone terraces. The market in Santanyí on a Wednesday, where the streets fill with local farmers and the colours are almost absurdly good. The port at Alcúdia at dusk, when the fishing boats cast long reflections and the sky does things that seem slightly exaggerated. The Serra de Tramuntana - Mallorca’s UNESCO-listed mountain range along the northwest coast - with cloud shadows moving across the slopes and the sea visible through gaps in the hills. None of this requires any particular photographic ambition. You just need to be there, with a camera, paying attention.

Come to Mallorca in April because the light is better. Come because the island is still itself. Come because you’ll have access to things that disappear under the weight of summer tourism. And come because Holy Week is one of those events, increasingly rare, that is visually extraordinary and genuinely real - that gives you something to photograph that has weight to it.

The summer will always be there. The processions happen once a year.

Plan accordingly.

All photographs in this piece were taken in Mallorca during Holy Week. If you’re planning a trip and want to know more about locations, logistics, or the specific towns I visited, drop a question in the comments.

I’d seen photographs of the Semana Santa processions and wanted to experience them properly - not as a tourist who happened to be passing through, but as someone who had shown up with a camera and a genuine desire to understand what was happening. The Procesión del Crist de la Sang, the Procession of the Christ of the Blood, taking place on Maundy Thursday, was the one I’d been most looking forward to. The largest of the week, winding through Palma’s historic centre for several hours, beginning at seven in the evening from the Church of the Annunciation.

What I hadn’t anticipated was how much the day itself would give me, long before the procession began.

By mid-afternoon, Palma is already different. The confraries - the old church brotherhoods, some of them centuries old - are gathering, practising, making their way to the start. Robed figures appear on street corners. Drums echo off stone walls in courtyards. The city runs two versions of itself at once: the cafés still full, the tourists still wandering, and underneath it, this other thing assembling. There is a particular charge to a city in the hours before something ancient is about to happen, and a photographer who arrives early will find it everywhere.

At seven, it begins.

Hooded figures in purple, brown, blue, white. Great floats carrying scenes from the Passion, shouldered by teams of bearers who will carry them for hours. Candles. Drums. The smell of wax and incense in the night air. I had done my research, but research does not fully prepare you for the reality of standing in a narrow medieval street as all of this comes toward you in the dark.

I should address the hoods directly, because it’s the first thing most northern Europeans and Americans notice: the tall, pointed capirote worn by the white-robed brotherhoods look, at first glance, startlingly like Ku Klux Klan robes. The resemblance is real. The history is not what you think. The capirote is a medieval Spanish tradition, worn by penitents for centuries before the Klan existed. The Klan borrowed the image and poisoned it. In Palma it means something else entirely: anonymity before God. You put the hood on and you become no one in particular. A banker beside a fisherman, indistinguishable. Once I understood this, the hoods became one of the most photographically interesting elements of the night - the way they flatten identity, the way candlelight catches the fabric, the way a hooded figure carrying a candle down a dark lane looks like it has stepped out of a century you can’t quite name.

The float carrying the Crist Jacent - the recumbent Christ - passes and the crowd applauds. Not politely. Genuinely. It’s startling the first time. Then it makes complete sense. What do you do when something you love goes past? Around the edges of the procession, children are doing what children have probably always done here: darting forward to catch the wax dripping from the penitents’ candles, holding out their hands or scraps of paper, collecting it like treasure. It is completely at odds with the solemnity of the thing, and completely of a piece with it. This is how you inherit a tradition. You start by catching the wax.

Membership of the brotherhoods runs in families. The man in the hood has a father who walked here, a grandfather before that. The woman watching from the pavement has a son in the procession. You can feel these threads running through the crowd if you pay attention, and paying attention is, after all, what you came to do.

The first hour pulls you in with sheer spectacle - the scale of it, the sound, the visual drama of the floats and the robed figures moving through the old streets. But be realistic about the conditions. The crowds are large and the streets of the historic centre are narrow; you will often be shooting from wherever you can find a position rather than wherever you would choose one. And once the light drops properly, it becomes genuinely difficult - candlelight is beautiful but it is not much to focus by, and the darkness swallows a lot. Work with what you have. Get low when you can, get close when the crowd allows, and let the light do the work rather than fighting it. The pictures are in the details when you can reach them. You have to accept the grain and the blur. In these conditions they are not problems. They are the truth of what the night looks like.

I’d been trying to work out what makes Dijous Sant in Palma different from other things I’ve photographed. Part of it is Easter itself. Unlike Christmas, Easter doesn’t begin with good news. It begins with death. The people in that procession are walking with someone toward something terrible, and they do it every year, and it costs them something. That shows on their faces in a way that is very hard to fake and very easy to photograph.

But it’s more than the religion. It’s the way the religion and the place and the families and the centuries have all wound together into something bigger than any one of those things. The procession belongs to Palma the way the cathedral does - not just as a building or an event, but as part of what the city is. You don’t have to be Catholic to feel it. You don’t have to be a believer of any kind. You just have to show up and pay attention.

Which is, when you think about it, more or less the job description for photography.

The Procesión del Crist de la Sang takes place on Maundy Thursday - Dijous Sant - as part of Palma’s Semana Santa. It begins at 7pm from the Church of the Annunciation and winds through the historic centre. Bring a wide lens, a fast prime, and more patience than you think you’ll need.

The Cothelstone Estate sits in the gentle folds below the Quantock Hills, and on the morning of the competition the sky was a hard, cloudless blue that promised photographers everywhere a deeply unreasonable working day. Strong shadows carved across the hedgerow, washing out the bright areas and swallowing the detail of the work in the dark ones. Every time I found a good angle, the sun had other ideas. A competitor would move slightly left, their cutting tool catching the full glare, and the shot turned into a silhouette whether I wanted it to or not.

But we will get to the photographic suffering in due course. First, there was a competition to watch.

If you have never seen hedge laying done, the process sits somewhere between surgery and sculpture. The hedgelayer almost cuts through each stem at its base, leaving just enough wood to keep it alive, then lays it nearly flat along the line of the hedge. That living connection to the roots is everything: without it, the stem dies rather than grows. In the Devon style, used here at Cothelstone, the stems are held in place with small forked sticks cut from the hedge itself and driven into the bank like tent pegs. It is a wonderfully self-contained method. The raised earth bank underneath does much of the work too, and the combination of the two forms a barrier that is genuinely difficult for livestock to push through.

The day was divided into three classes, from beginners laying seven metres to the Open class tackling ten. Competitors had been at work since half past nine, and by the time I arrived in the afternoon the early chaos of clearing and cutting had given way to something more considered, each competitor deep in the later stages of their section.

Watching someone good at this is a real pleasure. The finished section looks entirely different from the overgrown tangle it was an hour before: lower, denser, neater. Judges look at the quality of the work, how well it would actually contain animals, and how tidy the working area has been kept. A beautifully laid hedge that leaves the surrounding ground in chaos suggests someone who has not quite understood what the job is for.

Here is the thing about trying to photograph all of this on a bright March day. The sun does not cooperate. The hedgerow is a tangle of crossing branches, and every twig catches the light at a slightly different angle, creating a kind of visual mess that competes with the actual subject. I spent large portions of the afternoon moving around like an anxious satellite, looking for a position where the light was coming from somewhere useful. Hedge laying is also not a fast-moving activity, and what you are really trying to show is the quiet concentration of someone who knows exactly how far a stem will bend before it snaps. I came away with some pictures I liked and a thorough respect for anyone who photographs outdoors for a living.

It would be a serious omission to discuss the day without acknowledging its most enthusiastic attendees. The dogs were numerous, varied, and consistently excellent. Some watched the proceedings on leads with the focused attention of people who had strong opinions. Others had made their own arrangements: stretched out in the shade, working through biscuits with quiet dedication, or observing the whole affair from the safe distance of a car window. A hedge laying event is, among other things, a community occasion, and the dogs grasped this implicitly. By the time I left I had photographed as many of them as hedges, and I do not regret this.

It is easy to see hedge laying as nostalgia. That reading misses the point entirely. A well-laid hedge provides shelter and food for birds, insects and small mammals, slows water running off fields, and creates routes through which wildlife can move across an otherwise broken-up landscape. Some British hedgerows are thought to be over a thousand years old and are still doing the job they were first made to do. The Somerset Hedge Group exists to keep this knowledge alive and pass it on, and the competition at Cothelstone is a working test of living skills, taken seriously by the people who use them.

The Quantock Hills make a fine backdrop for all of this. The sun was relentless, the dogs were magnificent, and the hedge is, by now, well and truly laid.