The Cat Man....

As a rule men and dogs go together; women and cats go together. You may find the odd single chap who lives with a cat or two but it is generally not the case. And we've all come across the mad old dear who is surrounded by the things!

However, author, Tom Cox lives with six felines, and I should add, one woman. His latest book is titled, "Under the Paw, Confessions of a Cat Man" and is the subject of a feature in the Times. Nothing unusual in this you may think. The tricky bit of this assignment was that the Times2 section of the paper has recently undergone a redesign and I was asked to photograph said cats with studio lights and Tom incidental within the frame.

Now, getting six cats together in one place is difficult enough, let alone freaking them out with high powered strobes. Luckily, Tom hadn't fed them that day, so a group feed was decided on.  With food in the bowls the six were gathered together, remaining in place for long enough to get off half a dozen frames before deciding they'd had enough and disappeared back into the garden.

Getting it right was in all honesty, more by luck than judgement and enforced the old adage; never work with children or animals.

See Times article here.
Licence Tom Cox portraits here.

Salt and Vinegar with that...

For most of her life, Faye Campbell has eaten nothing but chips. One bowl a day washed down with glasses of milk.

For years it was just assumed that she was an extremely faddy eater, but Barts Hospital in London discovered that Faye was suffering from gastrooesophageal reflux. Reflux problems are common, affecting 18 per cent of otherwise healthy babies. 90 per cent of those affected will grow out of it naturally within the first year.

For sufferers such as Faye the condition is more distressing - the stomach sends strong acids back up the gullet and into the mouth. Faye had learned as a baby that food caused pain, and decided to do without. The only food she found acceptable was chips, although no one is sure why.


Daily Mail article here.
License Faye Campbell photographs here.

Coming to a Suburban Street Near You...

The production of cannabis used to be associated with far off places such as Morocco and Afghanistan. In the UK it is more likely to be grown here. Know as Skunk, and sporting a far greater hit then the resin varieties of yesteryear, (Analysis of recent homegrown hauls detected THC levels as high as 20%, nearly seven times higher than samples of imported resin, which used to be the predominant form of the drug on the streets, and typically contain around 3% THC,) it's big business and mainly run by Vietnamese gangs, and more often than not, run from a rented suburban home.

"A decade ago 11% of cannabis sold on the street was grown in the UK. "Now more than 60% is produced in Britain and we are currently finding two to three factories in London a day. This is a growing crime problem across the country." said a Police Inspector involved in raids in Hertfordshire. Due to Police in London cracking down on the farms, production has spread to counties around the UK.

Typically a house is rented from an Asian landlord in a perfectly ordinary suburban street, the windows blacked out, and nobody ever seen coming, or going. Inside is a very different story. The gangs tap into the electricity supply before the meter and rewire the house with heavy duty cable powering sodium lamps which provide sunlight to the crop. Looking after the needs of the plants is a 'gardener', often a young illegal immigrant, working from a recipe of daily feeding requirements with only cigarettes, porn movies and a buddhist shrine for company.

The raid I went on with Cambridgeshire police netted a crop worth £70,000. With a 12 week turn around for the 200 plants, this house had the potential to produce £750,000 per year. Lucrative indeed, and with very little risk for the gangs controlling the operation.

In Canada there was a similar explosion of Vietnamese controlled farms. The experience there suggests that methamphetamine is never far behind.

One organisation benefits from the Police raids; the local council receive the sodium lamps, to use in street lights.

Mail on Sunday article here.

Licence raid and cannabis plants photographs here.

The Two Minute Portrait Session...

Why is it whenever there is somebody interesting to photograph there is never enough time? I had been commissioned to photograph 2007 Nobel Prize for Medicine winner, Sir Martin Evans, somebody whom it would be ideal to spend a little time with getting a good set of portraits together. Unfortunately, I had a couple of minutes as he jumped out of a taxi between television stations.

Sir Martin, himself famous for genetically modifying mice during his pioneering stem cell research said the award was "astonishing" and a "boyhood dream come true."

Even with the limited time, my pictures have published widely, including the front page of the Daily Telegraph.

Daily Telegraph article here
Washington Post article here

Another Blow to Farming...

Agriculture in the UK suffered another blow this month with the arrival of Bluetongue at a small farm in Suffolk. Within days it had been confirmed at a number of other farms up to 50 miles away. Currently there is no vaccine, and as the disease is carried by midges, no way of controlling it's spread.

After initially killing infected animals, the government department responsible, DEFRA, who were desperate not to declare an outbreak, finally came to the conclusion that is was indeed an outbreak, and there was no point in a cull. Instead, they are praying for a cold winter.

The odd thing is, there have been over 8,000 cases in Germany this summer, along with large infections in Belgium, Holland and France. The virus has been making its way from the Mediterranean over a succession of warm winters so it was hardly a surprise when it appeared here, yet the government seemed to have no contingency plan at all.

For me it meant a week chasing around trying to find farms late in the day against newspapers deadlines, with no firm grasp of exactly where the latest infection had appeared. My pictures were used throughout the week in the Daily Mail, The Guardian, The Independent and The Times.

Licence photographs here.

£90k.....For a Wooden Shed?

It seems Britain is a society more divided than ever. Whilst thousands of young families are struggling to get on the housing ladder with prices spiralling far beyond what their earnings can pay for, one wealthy individual has paid over £90,000 for an 8'x6' wooden shed in the genteel seaside town of Southwold in Suffolk.

Of course, they have bought more than just a shed, they have bought into the fashionable Gun Hill end of the sea front. One upmanship? Keeping up with the Jones? Or just plain daft? Who can say? One can only surmise that money is no problem for the proud owner of a piece of real estate with no mains electricity, running water or gas. Owners are not allowed to sleep in their huts either. Waking up floating in the middle of the North Sea after a freak tide is bound to ruin a weekend after all.

Chairman of Southwold's Beach Hut Owners' Association, Dr Slim Dinsdale, said: “It is a sad fact that many people are now being priced out of owning a beach hut, I think that for some people they are becoming a trophy symbol."

For those with a little less loose change the local estate agents are advertising huts towards the pier end of town for around £35,000. A veritable bargain if ever there was one!

Times article here
Licence photographs here.

Coastal Erosion...

The East Anglian coastline has long been suffering from the constant battering of the North Sea, constantly shifting and redefining itself. It's saltmarshes and shingle spits the most obvious to us of this relentless change. Towns and villages have disapeared beneath the waves over hundreds of years, most famously at Dunwich and currently Happisburgh which becomes a little smaller every time there is a storm.

It is reported that the lighthouse on the shingle spit at Orford Ness, built in 1792 and the first on mainland Britain to be automated in 1965, may have to be pulled down and a new one erected further inland as the sea eats away at the beach.

A spokeswoman for Trinity House said: ''The lighthouse at Orford Ness was more than 100 metres away from the foreshore for much of the last century. ''However, with coastal erosion accelerating over the past decade, it is now only 45 metres from the shingle shore."

East Anglia is going to look very different over the next fifty years 

as successive governments abandon large scale coastal defences of these shores. Quite what will happen, nobody knows.

What a Refreshing Change...

Usually photographing a band involves nothing but hassle, unpleasant gorrilla types and the obligatory rights grab wanting you to sign over your life's work and a kidney for the pleasure of wanting to give them some exposure in the newspapers. Having dealt with this, you usually have the first three songs to get what you need before being unceremoniously slung out on the street. Some 'big' artists like you to foxtrot after one! They are normally the sort that keep a crowd, who have paid handsomely to stand in a cold open air stadium, waiting for an hour or so after the support act have finished before deciding they can be bothered to turn up.

Imagine my surprise when I arrived at Holkham Hall in Norfolk to shoot a feature for the Daily Mail on old school rockers, Status Quo.  I had been asked to photograph the two leading band members,Rick Parfitt and Francis Rossi around the theme of touring on a bus and their attitude couldn't be more different.

Upon arriving I was given an 'Access all Areas' pass and told to wander where I liked.  This I am not used to! After the writer had finished her stuff, I got to work.... trying to get something serious looking proved difficult. 

These guys liked to give a photographer the run around!

Actually the feature pics where tied up in about 20 minutes. No prima-donna's here. Even with all the mucking around they were very easy to work with, after all, they must have done this a million times before.

The PR asked if was going to shoot the concert, and if I wanted to photograph the whole gig including from the stage. I soon got some more memory cards from the car!

I'd always quite fancied going to a Quo gig; they are a British Institution, much like Beefeaters and wet summers, so this proved to be one of my better commissions of late made all the easier by their hospitality. 

Maybe this is why they have been around for so long. Some other so called stars should take note.

Licence photographs here.