Why I do what I do

There are two things I care about, and for a long time I thought they pulled in opposite directions.

The first is beauty. I like making something lovely to look at. I always have. I like light that falls softly across a room, warm tones, a photograph you could sit in front of for a while. A big part of why I do this is simply that I like making beautiful things.

The second is honesty. Something in me resists pretending, whether it's me being asked to do it or seeing it happen all around. Being told to arrange myself and hold a smile has always made me feel a bit self-conscious, not quite myself, that slightly frozen feeling when a camera is pointed at you and you're not sure what to do with your face. I think a lot of people feel the same. And when everyone's concentrating on looking right, something real tends to slip away, which is a shame, because the real thing is the bit worth having. That's what I'm hoping to feel when I look at a photograph. Something true. And feeling something is rather the point.

For years I assumed you had to choose. That beautiful meant posed and polished and a little bit false, and that real meant grabbing whatever you could, blurry and badly lit, as long as it was honest. Beauty on one side, truth on the other, pick one.

I don't believe that any more. The whole of what I do now comes from those two things turning out to be the same thing.

Because the most beautiful moments are the real ones. A child laughing properly, not performing a laugh. The way a parent's whole face changes when they look at their baby. The tears someone doesn't manage to blink away during a wedding speech. Two people holding hands through a christening without realising they're doing it. None of that can be posed, and none of it needs to be, because it's already lovely. My job isn't to arrange it. It's to be paying enough attention to catch it, and to know how to make the light and the tones do it justice afterwards.

And this doesn't mean nobody ever looks at the camera. I love a photograph where someone's looking right down the lens with a proper, genuine smile, that's a real moment too, and there's something lovely about people who are actually happy meeting your eye, whether that's a whole family together or a couple on their wedding day. What I'm after isn't people avoiding the camera. It's the difference between a real smile and a held one. A genuine smile at the lens is exactly the sort of thing I'm hoping for. A frozen say-cheese one is the thing I'd rather gently coax you out of.

That's it, really. No pretending, no arranging you into something you're not. Whether it's your family on an ordinary afternoon, the two of you on your wedding day, or a christening full of the people you love - just you, as you are, made into something beautiful you'll want to look at for a very long time.