Where in the world…?

From Alaska to Australia, from Svalbard to Antarctica, I’ve taken pictures in 26 countries on all seven continents. Phew…!

I thought it might be fun to show you this map and give you a potted history of my photographic trips since I turned professional in 2013, together with my favourite images from each one.

Some of these trips were quite short, and some were not dedicated photographic trips. For example, I’ve taught as a private tutor on various international assignments in Kenya, Switzerland, Turkey and Russia.

It also doesn’t include photo shoots for clients.

However, to keep things simple, my list just includes all those destinations where I’ve had a ‘proper’ camera with me, ie a bridge camera or a DSLR rather than just a smartphone.

You’ll see that not all the photos are of wildlife, but I think it might be a nice chance for you to see my other work, from snowflakes to St Basil’s Cathedral…!

If you want to see the original blog post describing any of my trips, just click the link in the title.

Laikipia & Mount Kenya - Kenya

When I was 15, I wanted to become a professional photographer; 30 years later, I finally made it!

I happened to get an email from a social group called Hooley Time inviting me to climb Mount Kenya and go on safari for two weeks, and I jumped at the chance.

In the end, we only saw one big cat on the whole trip - and that was on the final day! - but I managed to book the wrong flight home, so I ended up having my own personal 12-hour game drive!

We saw a cheetah ‘timing’ an impala, and the hunt was so exciting that I definitely caught the wildlife photography bug.

In those days, I only had a Sony Cyber-shot DSC-HX200V bridge camera, but it did have a nice watercolour feature.

This shot of a zebra is an example of the watercolour effect, and it was the first print I ever sold at my first exhibition in Wimbledon Village…

Kiruna - Sweden

Again, the trip started out with an email from Hooley Time, this time suggesting a long weekend at the Ice Hotel in Kiruna to see the Northern Lights.

I signed up along with four others, and we did actually see the Northern Lights, but not until the final evening!

At first, I thought my camera wasn’t good enough to capture anything, but I changed a few settings, and there they were!

I have to say, that was one of the most exciting moments in my whole photographic career - and there weren’t even any animals involved…

The rest of the time, we did typical Scandinavian things such as dog sledding and visiting a reindeer farm.

I’m still friends with Jason, the other guy on the trip, and he lives just down the road, so all’s well that ends well.

Glacier, Yosemite & Yellowstone - United States of America

Imagine drawing a big semi-circle on a map of the States from Seattle to San Francisco, flying over there and visiting every national park on the way.

That’s what I did a few years ago on a G Adventures trip led by Andrew Tipton.

He was a fantastic guide and, like me, had tried his hand at a few different careers in his time, including photography.

We got on very well and even went fly fishing together on the Snake River, but the opportunities for wildlife photography were surprisingly thin on the ground.

I spent a memorable morning with a North American bison, but that was about it.

There were more signs about bears than there were bears, and I ended up taking far more landscape shots than I would’ve liked…

Moscow - Russia

This was my first international assignment as a private tutor, and it was arranged by an agent called Andrei Grebelski.

It was a bit of a culture shock, but Andrei was good enough to call me most days to check in and help out with any issues, and we ended up becoming friends.

The highlight of my three-month stay came on my very first night when my client invited me to dinner at a very nice restaurant called Café Pushkin, followed by a trip to the Spasskaya Tower Festival in Red Square.

Given that I didn’t speak any Russian, the journey there by bus and underground was very stressful, but dinner was lovely, and my first view of Red Square was sensational as St Basil’s Cathedral (above) had been lit up by a host of coloured spotlights.

My clients’ son was interested in photography, and we had almost exactly the same camera, so we both took pictures of the cathedral and the military parades until it was time to go.

Unfortunately, we missed out on the firework display, but it was still a memorable introduction to Russia.

Ranthambore & Bandhavgarh - India

My first visit to India came on a trip to Rajasthan called Tigers and Temples run by G Adventures.

It seemed to be the perfect combination of subjects, but the tigers didn’t seem to get the memo!

We saw a couple of young ones for about 20 minutes beside a water hole, but that was it for a whole week in what should’ve been two of the best national parks in India for tiger sightings.

That was pretty disappointing, but it was fun to go and see some of the temples and forts, and I made friends with a nice couple called Jodie and Joe.

Unfortunately, there was also a Dutch girl in the party who was entirely too pretty for my own good, so that was a distraction I could’ve done without…!

At least I came away with this shot of a shy pig (see above).

We were in a tiny village called Tordi Sagar, and I just happened to see it poking its snout around one of the buildings, but it quickly went back inside.

I waited patiently (and uncomfortably!) on one knee for the pig to reappear, and eventually it did.

That was very good news, and I’ve now sold more prints of this shot than any other…

Verbier - Switzerland

This was another working holiday as a private tutor.

I was asked to teach English and Chemistry to a Russian brother and sister in a ski lodge in Verbier in the afternoons, and in the mornings I was expected to take them both out skiing!

A dream job if ever there was one…

There wasn’t any wildlife, obviously, but I took a lot of action shots of skiers going over jumps on piste, and I rather like this shot of a snowy night sky that looks just like the Milky Way (see above).

Gstaad - Switzerland

I was asked by a tuition agency to interview for a long-term job with a family living in Switzerland, and I went over to Gstaad with one of the directors to meet and greet them.

We were only there for a day or two, but it was fun to see the Gstaad Palace Hotel lit up at night and get wined and dined at someone else’s expense!

In the end, I didn’t get the job, but it made for a good story…

Antibes - France

This was another interview via the same agency just a few days later.

Again, we were only there for a day or two, and the format was pretty much the same, so I didn’t get much chance to take pictures.

The only ones I took were at Nice Airport, but I love architecture, and it’s a unique building, so I was happy…

London Zoo - United Kingdom

I know I’m supposed to be a ‘wildlife’ photographer, but there’s nothing wrong with going to a zoo when your favourite animals live a couple of thousand miles away!

London Zoo has a good collection of animals, but it was hardly designed with the photographer in mind.

There are countless barriers to taking pictures, including greasy glass partitions and fine mesh fences, so there’s a bit of an art to getting great shots.

Having said that, visiting a zoo offers a cheap and convenient way to photograph a lot of exotic creatures, so it shouldn’t be sniffed at.

You just have to make sure that you avoid getting any man-made objects in the frame…

Brest - Belarus

I worked in Belarus for a fortnight teaching English to a lovely young couple.

They included me in everything they did, including playing tennis and cycling in the forest, and the wife was a great cook, so we ate spectacularly well!

However, there wasn’t much of an opportunity for wildlife photography, so this shot of a couple of toads was all I managed to get…

Hong Kong - China

I worked in Hong Kong for three months as a private tutor for a few different families.

One of the mothers was very kind in setting me up in my apartment and making sure I had everything I needed, and the taxis were cheap enough for me to arrive in style for all my classes!

Unfortunately, the weather was very cloudy at that particular time of year, so it was ten days before it was sunny enough for me to could go up to Victoria Peak to see the view.

It was certainly spectacular, and I stayed up there from ten in the morning until nearly closing time at around nine at night.

I also took an open-top bus ride around the Hong Kong Island, and that actually gave me a great chance to take some abstract shots of all the skyscrapers.

There was a small zoo and an aviary where I took this shot of a Bali mynah bird, but that was about it when it came to birds and animals.

Svalbard - Norway

Svalbard was disappointing, but it shouldn’t have been.

We had around a dozen bear sightings, and one day a mother and cub put on quite a show for us, but the problem I had was that all my shots were far too soft.

It didn’t help that none of the bears came within a hundred yards of the ship, but the main problem was the lens I was using.

It wasn’t a Nikon lens, and I hadn’t fine-tuned the autofocus, so I had to delete virtually all my photographs!

Very sad…

Still, the tour was led by Paul Goldstein, who’s always entertaining, and I happened to share a hotel room and a cabin with a great bloke called Eric.

He was actually French, and his English wasn’t great, but I could speak fairly fluent French after spending a summer with a French girl in Lyon, so that worked out nicely.

Bodrum - Turkey

Every now and again, I’ve managed to snag a dream job tutoring abroad.

This was certainly one of them.

I had to teach for three hours in the morning, but my clients put me up at a five star all-inclusive resort on the coast, so the only real decision I had to make was pool, beach or hammock…!

There was no wildlife to speak of, but I did sleep on the beach one night in order to get a few star trails shots.

They didn’t really work out, so my favourite shot was this one of a rooster in the sunshine that I chanced upon when I went out for a walk.

London Wetland Centre - United Kingdom

I know my favourite animals don’t live on this island, but that’s not to say there aren’t opportunities closer to home.

I must say, I can be a bit lazy when it comes to going to places such as Richmond Park or the London Wetland Centre, but I do occasionally force myself to make an effort.

On this trip to the Wetland Centre, I spent a lot of time with a pair of otters at feeding time.

The angle wasn’t great as I had to shoot down into the pen from the walkway, but I don’t know how I would’ve got shots of otters in the wild, so beggars can’t be choosers, I suppose.

Battle - United Kingdom

When I went to the re-enactment of the Battle of Hastings in Sussex, I had no idea that there’d be a falconry display.

In the end, it turned out to be the highlight of the show as the falconer tied up his birds to feed and water them, and I was able to get within a few feet of a Harris hawk, a gyrfalcon and this golden eagle (see above).

The great thing about being so near to the birds is that I was able to get really sharp close-ups.

I’m a big fan of sharpness, and there aren’t many details you can’t capture from five feet away with a 500mm lens!

I was also lucky that the rain briefly stopped and the sun came out long enough for me to get a catchlight in the eagle’s eye.

I asked my friend James to print out a copy of this shot to put on my wall, and when he delivered it, we chatted for about 20 minutes, but I didn’t look at him once - I just couldn’t stop staring at the eagle!

Brighton - United Kingdom

I’ve only taken part in two photographic workshops, and this was the first.

I don’t remember all the details, but the idea was to practise our street photography skills in a place where there were bound to be some ‘interesting subjects’, shall we say.

And the teacher was right.

I came across this girl walking through the park, and it turned out that she was taking part in a cosplay production.

I wasn’t really interested in her story, but I was happy to get the picture…!

Ankara - Turkey

Sometimes, tuition assignments just don’t work out no matter how hard you try.

On this occasion, the boy I was supposed to be teaching burst into tears in our first lesson, and that was it.

I hung around for a couple of weeks while the client and the agent worked out what to do, but in the end I had to go home.

On the positive side, I had a great view of this mosque (see above) from my hotel window, and the restaurant food was so elegantly presented that I was able to practise my food photography skills every breakfast, lunch and dinner!

Athens - Greece

Every now and again, I work for a very, very wealthy client.

This one was a Greek shipping magnate - yes, they really do exist! - and he wanted me to teach his son and his two daughters in preparation for their entrance exams

He wanted to move to England and put them in a local school, so I went over to Athens for a couple of weeks to give them all lessons.

The children were by turns adorable and infuriating, but their father was a lovely man, and we got on very well.

It was the first time I’d ever been to Athens, and I remember having a hotel room with a view of the Parthenon!

I walked up there as soon as I could to take a few pictures, but it was a bit of a building site.

I did manage to take a couple of candid black and white shots of a musician and a tramp, but my favourite shot was this one of the Stoa of Attalos.

Again, no wildlife, but my client did introduce me to the Japanese ambassador on the ski slopes when the family went to Mount Parnassus for the weekend…!

Battersea Park Children’s Zoo - United Kingdom

This was one of the very rare photography trips that I went on with a friend.

Photography is a lonely business most of the time, but I did meet an amateur photographer called Alan at my tennis club, and we ended up going to Battersea Park Children’s Zoo together.

There wasn’t a huge collection of animals, but it was fun to shoot the breeze about photography, and it made a nice change to have a like-minded companion.

Thanks, Alan…!

Royal Ascot - United Kingdom

A friend of mine called James invited me to the Royal Enclosure at Ascot a few years ago, and that meant that I won the right to invite my own friends.

I’ve only been a couple of times, but when I went on this occasion, I invited my friends Matt and Diane and took my camera along for the ride.

Matt and Diane love champagne and fine dining, so they fitted in right away, and we were all dressed up to the nines like everyone else.

I took a few pictures of them, and one of them has ended up on goodness knows how many private hire websites!

I guess it projected the right fantasy for potential clients, and I’ve now sold it more than 50 times.

Anyway, my own favourite was this shot I took of a woman fixing her make-up in a plate glass window.

I was sitting in a café with Matt and Diane, and the woman was actually outside, but I was able to remove the reflections in Lightroom.

I had to crop it to a rather long and thin aspect ratio, but for me it still captures what Royal Ascot is all about…

Brooks Falls - United States of America

If you’re looking for the ultimate wildlife photography experience, then you won’t do much better than watching bears catching salmon at Brooks Falls, Alaska.

Every July, over a million salmon return to their spawning grounds on the Brooks River, and the brown bears are there to meet them!

Brooks Falls is the first waterfall the salmon have to jump, and some of the bears are able to catch the salmon in mid-air as they leap.

Thomas D Mangelsen took a famous shot called Catch of the Day in the 1980s that showed a salmon literally inches from the jaws of a bear, so in a way this is my hommage to that shot…

Gorillas & Masai Mara - Rwanda and Kenya

The trip was called ‘Gorillas and Masai Mara’, but it was a bit disappointing, to be honest.

We were only in the Masai Mara for a day, and our driver screwed up our chance of seeing a wildebeest river crossing by driving up to the bank before he was allowed to by the Kenya Wildlife Service official, who then tore a strip off him and basically ordered us out of the park!

The gorilla visits didn’t go very well either.

Admittedly, I did see a couple of families including a six-month old youngster, but I didn’t manage to get any great shots.

The highlight should’ve been the encounter with this leopard (see above).

Another group had seen him in the tree, and we went out later on a game drive and managed to find him, still lying on the same branch.

I got one or two shots of him, but he soon turned round and started climbing down the trunk of the tree.

It was very exciting, but I was so flustered that I just ended up ‘spraying and praying’ without making sure that my focus was locked on.

The result was that all my shots were slightly out of focus.

That was such a shame, but I learned an important lesson.

(And I managed to sharpen this one up a bit with Topaz Labs Sharpen AI, so all was not quite lost…!)

Galápagos Islands - Ecuador

The year 2016 was my photographic annus mirabilis.

I was trying to buy a flat, but the vendor died, and my mortgage offer expired before probate could be sorted out, so I was left with over a hundred grand in my bank account

What better to do with a little spare change than spend it all on photography equipment and a trip to South America…?!

I bought myself a new camera and a couple of new lenses and then booked the mother of all travel itineraries that took in the Galápagos Islands, Iguazú Falls, Buenos Aires, the Falklands, South Georgia and the Antarctic Peninsula.

The Galápagos were my first port of call, and this is my favourite shot (see above).

People joke that I must’ve had all week to take this picture, but I actually had only a few seconds to spare after getting out of the van.

I wanted to get the tortoise while it was crossing the road, and even though it was walking fairly slowly, I still had to get my camera out, choose my settings and compose the shot.

Fortunately, I managed it in the end, and I’ve now sold this image through stock agencies nearly 300 times…

Iguazú Falls - Brazil/Argentina

My visit to the Galápagos and my cruise to Antarctica were originally supposed to be separate trips, but there were only a few days in between, so the Audley Travel rep I spoke to suggested flying straight from one to the other.

The only problem was finding something to do for the intervening time

In the end, I settled on booking a helicopter ride over Iguazú - which is the South American equivalent of Niagara Falls - and a tango show in Buenos Aires.

The falls were too wet to take any decent pictures in person, and the it was hard to avoid reflections when taking pictures through the helicopter canopy, but I happened to notice a walk-in aviary across the road that had a host of exotic birds on display.

After my helicopter flight was over, I spent the afternoon there, and this is my favourite shot.

It’s a Chilean flamingo, and I was just lucky that on what was a bright, sunny day there was still enough shade from some tall trees to allow me to create a black background.

Buenos Aires - Argentina

I wasn’t that impressed with Buenos Aires.

I went on a walking tour with a beautiful guide called Natalia, and we saw Eva Peron’s mausoleum at La Recoleta Cemetery, but the architecture was less impressive than I’d been led to believe.

Still, I was only there for a day, and the tango show I went to at a local hotel was fantastic.

I used to do a bit of ballroom dancing when I was at Oxford, so it brought back a few happy memories…

Falkland Islands, South Georgia & Antarctic Peninsula - Antarctica

Admittedly, I did burn through a lot of cash in 2016, and the Antarctic cruise alone cost over £14,000, but at least I ended up with one very successful photograph (see above).

This is my all-time best-selling image, and I’ve now sold more than 2,400 copies of it to buyers around the world.

I was just walking along a shingle beach at Brown Bluff on the Antarctic Peninsula when I noticed a few Adélie penguins jumping off an iceberg into the water.

I went down to the water’s edge and started taking pictures.

As I did so, one of the penguins decided to jump to the next-door iceberg instead, and that led to a mad scramble!

I took loads of pictures, but this is the best one: the body position is dynamic, the flippers are pushed back in readiness for landing and the penguin is just a few inches off the ice.

Perfect!

The other memorable moment came when I finally set foot on Antarctica.

It was the seventh and last continent to tick off, so I couldn’t resist a little smile…!

In general, we were very lucky with the weather on that cruise.

In our daily briefing every evening, the tour guide kept us posted with the latest schedule and also what was happening with other cruise ships nearby using a colour-coded weather map.

One was doing our itinerary in reverse (ie Antarctica first, followed by South Georgia and the Falklands) and always seemed to be sailing through the red areas on the map where the high winds and rough seas were.

Another sailed from Australia but was ‘weathered out’ and had to turn back without a single person setting foot on land…!

The worst conditions we had to face were nine-metre seas one night.

It wasn’t fun trying to get to sleep - particularly where I was in the bows! - but it was hardly life-threatening.

The other big plus for me came when I met Phil, Judy and Tracy on board.

We instantly clicked, and we ate together almost every day and spent a good part of every Zodiac cruise together.

It makes such a difference when you meet nice people, and I’ve generally been very lucky on most of my trips.

Okavango Delta, Moremi, Chobe and Victoria Falls - Botswana

The final trip I went on in 2016 was a two-week mobile safari in Botswana, finishing up at Victoria Falls.

It didn’t start well when the person who should’ve been my guide and driver cried off and fobbed me off with someone who looked half his age!

However, he and I got along very well together, and the great thing about the trip was that I was the only guest, so it was effectively a private safari.

That meant I could go wherever I wanted whenever I wanted, and that was a big bonus.

It was only ‘shoulder season’ in April, so there wasn’t as much game as there’d be later on in the year, but we literally spent every day out on a game drive from dawn ‘til dusk, so I doubt we missed out on much!

I also found time for an excursion on the Chobe River, and it proved very productive.

I got a lovely close-up of a malachite kingfisher when the driver of the boat cut the engine and drifted to within three feet of the little bird, and then I spotted this elephant walking along the river bank (see above).

My guide beached the boat, and we waited for the elephant to reach us.

Fortunately, it stopped just in front of us and started giving itself a dust bath.

That’s always a great time to shoot elephants, and I took a burst of maybe 20-25 shots, but this is by far my favourite: a fraction of a second earlier or later, and the moment would’ve been lost.

Pantanal - Brazil

I chose to go on this tour in order to see the jaguar - the third biggest cat in the world after the tiger and lion.

We had some great sightings of cats on the river bank, and we were also lucky enough to see a kill.

A young male jaguar caught a caiman (a type of crocodile), and we were able to watch from our boat as he desperately tried to kill it and drag it up the very steep, sandy bank.

He spent about 10 minutes trying to get the ‘right’ grip on the back of the animal’s neck and then another 25 minutes looking for a place to climb the cliff.

When he finally managed it, everyone in the boats gave him a round of applause…!

We also saw a bunch of other wildlife, including ocelots, anteaters, toucans and hyacinth macaws, and our guide Andy Skillen was great to be around, with a good sense of humour and a willingness to teach whatever we needed to learn.

I’ve kept in touch with him ever since, and I’m now due to go with him to the Arctic tundra of northern Canada to see the polar bear migration in temperatures as low as -30°C.

Fingers crossed I can still cross my fingers after that…!

Tadoba - India

If Andy Skillen is one of my two favourite tour guides, then Paul Goldstein is the other.

I’ve been on half a dozen trips with him to Svalbard, Kicheche and Tadoba, and he never disappoints.

The big advantage of being with him is that he makes it his absolute priority to get you into the best possible position to take pictures of wildlife - even if that means waking you up at three in the morning after a polar bear’s been spotted!

He’s also a great raconteur, so it’s always fun to be in a jeep with him or just listen to him hold court after dinner.

I went on this Exodus trip to Tadoba to make up for the lack of success I’d had in Ranthambore and Bandhavgarh, and I wasn’t disappointed.

In the end, we saw around 12 tigers spread over 11 game drives in the course of five-and-a-half days.

We also saw a sloth bear and a few other animals, but a tiger safari is like no other safari: the tiger is everything, and nothing else matters.

One of the good things about Paul is that he pushes me to experiment and try out different techniques.

For this shot of a tiger in a water hole (see above), I happened to overhear him telling one of the guests to ‘underexpose slightly’ in order to prevent the whites on the tiger’s chest from being clipped.

I thought to myself, “Go big or go home,” so I underexposed by two stops and then played around with it in Lightroom in order to make it look like the tiger was in a cave, illuminated by a single shaft of light.

Of course, in real life, it was 47°C, and the sun was shining out of a clear blue sky, but that’s the point of experimentation: if the world gives you lemons, then you have to know how to make lemonade!

Cabárceno - Spain

Cabárceno is a town near Santander in northern Spain that has a fantastic safari park with dozens of exotic species, including the Big Five, tigers, cheetahs and more.

A few years ago, my friend Tammy invited me to go to a photography workshop there given by one of her favourite wildlife photographers, Marina Cano.

I jumped at the chance to go on a photography trip with a friend, and we ended up having a great time.

We even managed to extend our stay by a day when we met an elderly couple who offered to drive us around in their camper van.

The joy of Cabárceno is that you can see so much in such a short space of time.

All the pens are right next to one another, so all you need to do is drive to whichever animal you want to see, park the car, get out and take pictures to your heart’s content.

And it’s very cheap!

Admittedly, the workshop itself added around £250 to the bill, but the annual park entrance pass was only €45, the bed and breakfast place where we stayed was only €40 a night and the flights were only a hundred quid return!

Lake Manyara, Serengeti, Ngorongoro Crater, Tarangire - Tanzania

I’d always wanted to go to Tanzania, but the reason I went in January was that it was the only safari destination where it wasn’t likely to be pouring with rain!

The tour I went on took us to all the main destinations, and my favourite image was this one of the lilac-breasted roller.

Every now and then, luck plays a huge part in getting a great image, and this was certainly one of those occasions.

I was on a game drive with a lovely lady called Karen when I suddenly saw a lilac-breasted roller perched on a nearby branch.

It was very close, so I quietly got into position so as not to disturb it and pointed my 800mm lens at the bird.

Just as I pressed the shutter, it flew off!

…Or did it?

I looked up from my camera, and it was still there.

What had actually happened is that it had just fluttered its wings, and when I looked at the shot on the back of my camera, I realised that I could the beautiful colours of its feathers that wouldn’t have been visible otherwise.

I also realised that it had been holding a grasshopper in its beak that I’d never even seen!

As I say, sometimes luck plays a part, but I guess I at least had the right settings and gave myself a chance.

Richmond Park - United Kingdom

As I say, I’m a bit lazy when it comes to making the most of the wildlife on my doorstep, but on this particular occasion I woke up to find that a blanket of snow had fallen over London, so I was determined to get a few shots of the deer in snowy Richmond Park.

In the end, I didn’t manage anything particularly exciting, but I’m glad I made the effort.

Snow doesn’t come along too often in London, so it was a rare chance to capture this kind of shot (see above).

Kicheche Bush Camp - Kenya

The thing that gets me most excited when I’m on safari in Africa is the prospect of seeing a kill.

The best way to see one is to follow a cheetah as cheetahs tend to hunt during the day and chase their prey in often spectacular fashion.

By contrast, lions usually hunt at night, and leopards are ‘ambush predators’, so it’s very difficult to catch them at it.

The week I spent at Kicheche with Paul Goldstein was uniquely memorable.

Despite having been on five safaris, I’d never seen a kill, and I was getting increasingly frustrated.

Fortunately, I ended up seeing not one but FIVE cheetah kills during that week, and that’s not counting many other unsuccessful chases.

This shot (see above) shows the first kill I ever saw.

It was all over in just a few seconds.

We could see the cheetah and the Thomson’s gazelles, and Paul had put us in what he thought was the best position to see any potential hunt.

He’d also made sure that we were set up correctly, standing up in the vehicle, resting our lenses on beanbags on the roof and with plenty of room to manoeuvre.

I was very nervous, and the action happened so fast that only one shot out of a burst of 10 or 20 was usable.

The animals had been a long way away, so they were quite small in the frame, and annoyingly one of the gazelles had run in between the two animals I wanted.

Fortunately, though, I was able to clone out the other animal in Lightroom and crop in tightly on the action.

Paul had a look on my computer later and thought I’d cropped in far too much, but I still prefer this version, and I’ve sold over 100 copies now, so it looks like the picture editors agree with me!

Phnom Penh, Killing Fields, S21 & Angkor Wat - Cambodia

Every guy has a favourite hooker, and mine is a 20-stone Australian ex-rugby league player called Kevin!

I met him sinking a few pints in the pub while we were both watching a Liverpool game.

We ended up hitting it off, and we became friends.

He was living just down the road in Wimbledon in those days, but he soon went back to Brisbane to live with his fiancée (now wife), Gerlinde.

I mention this because my trip to Cambodia, Vietnam and Thailand was part of the celebrations for Kevin’s 50th birthday.

Kevin and Gerlinde had done a similar itinerary a couple of years beforehand, and they’d enjoyed it so much that they wanted to share it with their friends.

In the end, there were five of us on the trip, and the first port of call was Cambodia.

The main reason Kevin wanted to go there was to fire a bazooka at a driving range!

He missed the target (twice!), but at least he’d lived the dream…

After that, we made a few excursions from Phnom Penh to one of the ‘killing fields’ and S21 - a horrific political prison and death camp dating back to the Pol Pot régime - and then flew to Siem Reap in order to visit Angkor Wat.

I wasn’t that impressed with the main temple, which was too old and decrepit for my taste, but I liked some of the other smaller temples such as Ta Prohm, the one whose combination of stonework, vines and monkeys inspired the Tomb Raider video game and films.

The best part about Angkor Wat itself was the juxtaposition of the monkeys and the ancient stone buildings.

I tried to get a flavour of it in this shot (see above), but I was just too late to capture the orange the macaque had been eating!

Never mind…

Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon), Cu Chi Tunnels, Long Tan & Cần Giờ (Monkey Island) - Vietnam

The Vietnam leg of our trip focused mostly on the war.

We went to the Cu Chi Tunnels, where the Viet Cong (VC) had hidden and protected themselves from American aerial bombardment, to Long Tan, one of the battlefields where Australian troops had been in action, and to Cần Giờ (Monkey Island), another VC base.

We had a local guide throughout, but his commentary as we walked around the tunnels made me a bit uncomfortable.

Communism has accounted for over 100 million deaths around the world, so it was a bit hard to take when he gleefully started telling us about all the imaginative booby traps ‘we’ had come up with to kill the Americans.

It was like visiting Auschwitz and hearing a German tour guide saying, “This is what we used to do to the Jews...”

Bangkok - Thailand

When I was planning my trip to Bangkok, a friend of mine helpfully told me that I could get a blow job for 800 baht (or £20)...!

Sadly, I never found out whether he was right or not as we spent most of our time wandering around the local temples.

Some of them were quite spectacular, and the architects certainly found plenty of excuses to cover things in gold leaf!

On Kevin’s birthday, we had a pool party at the hotel, which was a lot of fun.

He’s a great fan of cricket, so he’d even brought a miniature cricket bat so that he could symbolically raise it in order to celebrate his half century!

(Please note: alcohol was consumed in vast quantities during this part of the trip…)

Klein’s Camp, Serengeti Under Canvas & Grumeti Serengeti Tented Camp - Tanzania

This trip was a really big moment in my photographic career.

Being a wildlife photographer often involves spending a lot of money on travel, and a week’s safari holiday can cost upwards of £6,000, so I was curious when I happened to see an online article about a photographer who’d managed to get himself 365 nights of accommodation in Africa in exchange for the pictures he took.

I thought I could have a go at that myself, so I simply Googled ‘safari lodges in Kenya and Tanzania’, sent out around 50 emails and waited for the replies.

In just a couple of weeks, I had 17 offers, including one from &Beyond, asking if I’d be interested in being the ‘resident photographer’ from March to May, teaching guests as well as taking wildlife shots for the company!

That was great news.

Not only did I get free board and lodging, but I’d be able to go on game drives every day for three whole months, giving me a far better chance of getting great shots than if I kept going on safari for a week at a time.

In the end, I took nearly 80,000 photographs during the four months I stayed at &Beyond’s lodges in Tanzania and Cottar’s in Kenya, and 40 out of my top 100 colour images date from that trip.

This shot of a lion (see above) is my favourite, and I like it so much I now use it as my iPhone wallpaper…!

Cottar’s 1920s Safari Camp - Kenya

Cottar’s was the other place where I stayed during my long trip to Africa in 2019.

It was not quite as productive, largely because I wasn’t able to go on as many game drives.

There were so many guests that there was rarely a spare seat, or the guests wanted a private safari instead.

Hey, ho.

I still managed to get a few good shots, and this leopard close-up is my favourite.

I’d seen a leopard crossing the savannah during a game drive, but he’d climbed right up into the topmost branches of a tree.

We waited for 20 minutes or so, and finally he came down and posed for us, first in the fork of the tree and then literally three yards away on the grass.

With my trusty 800mm ‘big dog’, I was just about able to take this shot at the bare minimum focusing distance of the lens.

London Wetland Centre - United Kingdom

When I went to the London Wetland Centre, I was hoping to be able to get some good experience shooting birds in flight, but there weren’t really enough, and I couldn’t really get close enough.

I did manage a few shots of some male mallards (see above), but nothing spectacular.

Gabus Game Ranch & Etosha - Namibia

Until recently, the longest journey I’d ever had to make was 36 hours. That was how long it took to get to Brooks Falls in Alaska to see the bears catching salmon. My trip to Namibia ended up taking seven months!

The problem was Covid.

I was supposed to spend a couple of weeks there in March 2020, but the Namibia/South Africa border was closed due to the pandemic, so I had to cancel my flights.

Fortunately, I got a WhatsApp message from the owner’s son in October that year asking me how soon I could fly out.

It was a Sunday, and I had a few things to sort out, but I told him I could be there that Thursday.

In the end, Covid intervened again when the laboratory lost my test sample, and I ended up stranded in Frankfurt for two days!

Fortunately, I still managed to spend two weeks at Gabus Game Ranch, and that included a weekend in Etosha National Park.

I was keen to go to Etosha because of the chance of seeing rhino there, and I certainly wasn’t disappointed.

We saw a total of 17 black and white rhino, and there were so many that my host Harald eventually just drove past them if they were more than a hundred yards away!

What luxury…

It was only a short trip, and a ‘game ranch’ is obviously not quite the same as the Serengeti or the Masai Mara, but the staff were really lovely, and that always means a lot to me.

Kicheche Bush Camp - Kenya

I was lucky to be able to go to Kenya in January 2021.

Nobody was allowed to go there on holiday, and the only way it would work is if I travelled on business.

As a photographer, that was a loophole I could easily jump through, so it all worked out in the end - although not without a few bureaucratic problems.

The main one was where to get my Covid test while I was over there.

I was worried that I’d have to cut short my stay at Kicheche and go back to Nairobi early in order to take the PCR test and wait for the results, but fortunately the lodge manager discovered that a local Virgin camp had taken on a nurse who could do the test for me.

Sadly, I didn’t take many good photographs while I was out there.

We did see one cheetah kill, but I was so out of practice that I didn’t get a single usable shot of it, and the weather didn’t help.

It was very cloudy and wet, which meant that we only saw one sunrise (and no sunsets) during the whole trip, which meant very few ‘golden hour’ shots.

The secondary effect of the rain was that we saw less wildlife due to the long grass: the ‘prey’ animals were just too afraid of hidden predators so graze there, so we’d regularly drive for miles and miles without seeing any.

Everything changed on the last day, though.

We had a great sunrise with a blanket of fog thrown in for good measure, and I was able to take a few atmospheric shots of a buffalo in silhouette.

Later on, I mentioned to Paul that I hadn’t been able to get any shots of birds, and he promised to find me something.

Funnily enough, he almost immediately spotted a few European bee-eaters near a dead tree stump, and we tried taking slow pan shots as they flew back and forth.

Eventually, one landed on the tree stump, and I took this shot (see above).

Again, luck was on my side.

Without even realising it, I’d managed to press the shutter just as the bee-eater tossed a fly into the air, and it ended up perfectly positioned in the bird’s open beak!

Future trips

You can see all my upcoming ‘work’ trips on the Events page, which I update on a regular basis, but my next two expeditions are to Canada and the Antarctic.

Nothing is definite at the moment due to Covid, but I’m hoping to be able to shoot polar bears around Hudson Bay in November and then visit the Antarctic Peninsula in December.

Fingers crossed…!

If you’d like to order a framed print of one of my wildlife photographs, please visit the Prints page.

If you’d like to book a lesson or order an online photography course, please visit my Lessons and Courses pages.