From my height, I see a wider world;
through my blue eyes, I reimagine it…

Advertising photography

My main profession - making imaginative images for advertising agencies and magazines in London, Paris, Johannesburg, São Paulo, Los Angeles, and San Francisco (now my adopted home of more than thirty-five years). The images were key to a campaign's success - helping my clients serve theirs better, and project their desires.

Working with the likes of Rich Silverstein of Goodby, Silverstein & Partners, Condé Nast, and other major agencies and publishers worldwide - shaping the work from the first idea to the finished image, much of it award-winning.

Design & the built environment

As a naïve sixteen-year-old straight from a UK boarding school, a fortnight as a draughtsman at Rolls-Royce was enough - a sea of identical drawing boards stretching into the distance was not a life I could face. I found my way instead to a small arts-and-crafts college, and from there to one of the leading art colleges of its day, training in communication and design. A range of design work since - including time in the Conran design world, and building custom homes from the ground up.

Privileged in my education, but with little experience of the wider world out there - an inner restlessness kept pulling me off the path that had been chosen for me, until I blindly found my own.

Pedestrian-safety crash research

Contracted to the Transport & Road Research Laboratory, working on the British Leyland SRV5 - a 1970s safety prototype - analysing high-speed film to find the force at which the human body breaks. An ideal position to put my talents and curiosity to use, for the thrill of researching as part of a team.

Groundwork for standards now in every car; UK pedestrian deaths have fallen from roughly eight a day then to about one today.

Perhaps the aptitude is inherited: a distant relative of mine was Mary Edwards of Ludlow (c. 1750-1815), a human "computer" who spent some forty years calculating the astronomical tables in Britain's Nautical Almanac entirely by hand - one of the very few women in Georgian England paid for scientific work in her own right. Her daughter Eliza, also a distant relative, carried the work on after her. Both were among the few women engaged by the Board of Longitude, which oversaw the Nautical Almanac; the Edwards women exemplified women's early contribution to science and computation, helping ensure safer ocean voyages by supplying the reliable annual astronomical tables that mariners depended on.

Bonded courier, special operations

Three years with Loomis International carrying cash letters and high-value instruments through Europe, into the Middle East and over the Atlantic, against the Federal Reserve's daily clock - the youngest on a team of hardened ex-servicemen with pasts they never spoke of. That maturing youth only wanted to see the world, never imagining he would be let into the inner workings of global banking.

For the giants of world finance in the 1970s - the analogue dawn of modern money and technology, before the fax machine, let alone the likes of FedEx.

Native plant conservation & restoration

Years of restoring native habitat - seed sourcing, propagation, and long-term land restoration - work my family's roots in the land left me ideally suited to. Along the way, designing and building an aquaponics system, and running an educational nursery growing vegetable seedlings.

Work with the National Park Service, the Sierra Club, Save the Bay, Hoopa Tribal Forestry, and Marin Master Gardeners.

Software & web systems

Designing and building database-driven web portals end to end - front-end, API, and admin tooling - with a bias for clean, readable interfaces.

My early days were at Planet Point, a boutique web-design and development studio in Oakland in the early-to-mid 2000s, building for commercial artists and film-production companies: searchable artist portfolios, e-commerce stores, and password-protected screening rooms and press kits that let film-makers share dailies and manage distribution. It was built in Adobe ColdFusion (Allaire, then Macromedia, then Adobe) - the go-to tool for rapid, dynamic web work long before WordPress - and we were among those testing and interacting with its development as it evolved.

Racing machines & form and function

I suppose my respect for skilled engineering is what drew me into the world of racing, alongside my other careers - manufacturing racing frames and engine parts, and now a specialist in the remarkable Yamaha HL500. Always drawn to machines that are as beautiful as they are useful.

Restoration, fabrication, and the history behind each marque.

Rural Shropshire is my roots

Born to a hill-farming family above the picturesque medieval market town of Ludlow. The chapter I'm setting out on now: bringing family ground in the Welsh Marches back into careful stewardship, with traditional land management and native botany in the spirit of Robert Hart's forest gardening.

Flora & Field Stewardship - Marches Conservation, in its early days.

Core values

Originality & curiosity. Thinking beyond the conventional, questioning the status quo, and constantly seeking new perspectives.

Continuous improvement. A relentless desire to make things better - in my own work, and in the lives of others.