Navy Lark

Oli has been working with the Fleet Air Arm onboard HMS Ocean. As a guest of 702 Naval Air Squadron he joined the ship for 4 days to follow their fortunes in a 'mock war' as the final week of training before being posted to parts distant. The squadron uses MK 8 Lynx helicopters equipped with some very sophisticated radar for searching out bad guys at sea, both on it and under it.

A lot of the flights took place at night, and with no tripods or flash allowed on the flight deck, a steady hand was needed to get some of the shots!

SEAT Exeo ST

Oli has been in the studio recently to produce a series of photographs for SEAT Cars of their new Exeo ST. Working together with art director Darren Smith they came up with a series that blurred the line between photography and graphics, but that still came about from work done in camera.

New Faces

Oli recently shot some portraits of owners of Triumph motorcycles, a departure from his normal work, and was pleased to have them taken up by Global Beach, a well known digital agency to help fulfil an upcoming brief for Triumph themselves.

Highland Fling

Oli covered the Etape-Caledonia for the Mail on Sunday's Live magazine, and although the weather was very grey and wet produced some atmospheric shots, featuring a superlight carbon-fibre composite cycle that probably weighed less than one of his cameras!

Rotor & Wing

Oli has recently had his work published in the popular commercial helicopter magazine Rotor & Wing in the United States. His pictures were used to illustrate a story on making landings on water, deliberate ones and not so deliberate ones! To get one of the shots he had to wade out into the sea to chest height and invite the pilot to 'float' his helicopter right up to him!

Lost and Found

There's always a benefit to revisiting pictures that get overlooked in an original edit. Oli was shooting in Florida recently and on his way to the airport in a taxi, spotted these abandoned and rotting US Navy aircraft in the trees behind a fence. Quickly getting the taxi driver to do a u-turn he kept him waiting, and risked missing his flight while he shot a series of frames. It was not until sometime after his return to the UK that he came upon the pictures hiding in a folder of the trip. The rest can be seen on the personal section of his web-site.

New Dunlop Tyre Campaign

Oli has just completed a campaign of studio pictures for Dunlop Motorcycle Tyres. Working with art director Ben Carratu from P'zaz the aim was to create very graphic images that could be used in a variety of ways. Initial feedback from the sales team at Dunlop was 'the best material we've had!' The rest of the shots can be seen on the studio section of Oli's site here

From Here to There

Oli was invited to exhibit some of his photography at the Arts Institute at Bournemouth together with 25 other photographers to celebrate 50 years of photography at the College. Each exhibitor included an image they created during their time at college together with a selection of the work they are doing now. The exhibition has a permanent web-site which can be seen here . It was a tremendous privilege to be involved and the private view was a great opportunity to catch up with other photographers who also exhibited, some of whom are big names, such as Nick Knight and Wolfgang Tilmans.

Lighthouse life

Oli has recently completed a story on the crews that keep the offshore lighthouses around the south-west coast of Britain in good working order. All the lighthouses are automated these days but still need regular maintenance. This involves landing crew and equipment in all weather on to the top of the pillar lanterns that are perched precariously on rocks in the raging seas around Cornwall. Oli flew with a maintenance crew by helicopter to Longships lighthouse off the end of Lands End to shoot the story, to be printed in Flyer Magazine.

Happy Accidents

Even when he'd dropped a very expensive camera down a cliff, destroying it, Oli kept shooting with a spare, on a job in the Lake District for Skoda. 'We were trying to get some background atmospheric shots of climbers, and although I was tied on to the rock-face, the camera wasn't.. I only nudged it, and it was gone!' he said ruefully. 'Luckily we could carry on, and we got some quite interesting stuff.'