Awards, Recognition & a Slightly Uncomfortable Amount of Self-Promotion
Updated: 6 days ago
Awards, Recognition & a Slightly Uncomfortable Amount of Self-Promotion
Awards pages are dangerous things.
Done badly, they can make a photographer sound as though he spends his evenings polishing trophies while waiting for somebody to ask what all the initials after his name mean.
So this is not really a page about awards.
It is a page about why I still care about pictures after more than three decades of making them — with a few bits of recognition along the way that I am quietly pleased about, even if I would rather show you a photograph than a certificate.
I have been photographing weddings since 1989 and have now photographed more than a thousand of them. Before weddings took over quite so comprehensively, my background was in commercial and advertising photography.
The fascination with images started much earlier.
My father was a watercolour painter, and I suspect some of it began there: watching someone look at light, shape and colour and turn an ordinary scene into something worth stopping for.
I have never really stopped looking.
A few things I am quietly pleased about
Over the years, the work has received recognition from photographic organisations and publications including:
MyWed — Top 100 UK Wedding Photographers, 2024
SLR Lounge — Top 100 UK Wedding Photographers, 2020
Seven awards from the Master Photographers in Kent for work entered into photographic competitions
Shotkit — featured photographer
Fearless Photographers — member
Professional qualifications and associations with BIPP, RPS, SWPP and MPA
I am genuinely proud of all of them.
I am also reasonably certain that no bride has ever looked at a wedding photograph and said, "Lovely expression. Do we know how many professional bodies he belongs to?"
Which is probably as it should be.
What awards are actually useful for
Awards do have a purpose.
They show that the work has been looked at critically by people within the photographic industry. They suggest consistency. They provide a little reassurance that I have been doing this long enough to know which end of the camera to point at the wedding.
All useful things.
But they are not why I photograph.
The reason is still the picture itself.
A gesture between two people.
A face caught for half a second.
A room suddenly transformed by light.
A photograph where everything lands in exactly the right place even though nobody planned any of it.
Those are the things that still make me look twice.
Where it probably started
My father painted in watercolour.
I grew up around somebody who understood that looking is not the same thing as seeing.
A landscape could be perfectly ordinary until the light changed. A small detail could suddenly become the whole picture. Colour could be quiet or loud. Empty space mattered just as much as the thing placed inside it.
Photography is obviously a different medium, but I think the instinct is related.
I have always been drawn to images rather than simply photographs.
Painting, cinema, fashion, portraiture, architecture, old photographs, contemporary art — anything that does something interesting with light, shape, colour or human behaviour tends to catch my attention.
Perhaps that is where the obsession started.
I am not blaming my father entirely.
But he certainly has a case to answer.
The problem with becoming too respectable
Photography can become terribly serious if you let it.
There are qualifications, competitions, technical discussions, expensive equipment and enough opinions about lenses to fill several small libraries.
All of that has its place.
But a wedding is not an examination.
People laugh, cry, lose things, dance badly, say the wrong thing in speeches, disappear at precisely the moment they are needed and occasionally create far better photographs than anything I could have arranged.
That is why I have always preferred a mixture of approaches.
The documentary side watches and waits.
The editorial side steps in when the light, clothes, architecture or atmosphere deserve something more deliberate.
And the artistic side is simply the bit that keeps asking:
Can this be more interesting?
Sometimes the answer is yes.
Sometimes the answer is to stop interfering and let Uncle David continue whatever he is doing on the dance floor.
A commercial eye without making a wedding look like an advert
My early commercial and advertising background taught me a great deal about light, composition, detail and the discipline of making an image work.
That experience still shapes the photography.
But weddings taught me something equally useful:
People are not products.
They do not need to be polished into submission.
The interesting part is often the imperfection — movement, expression, weather, chaos, atmosphere and the moments that would disappear if somebody stopped the day to make everything tidier.
So the aim is not to make a wedding look like an advertising campaign.
It is to know when a little precision can make a photograph stronger, and when everybody should simply be left alone.
Still looking at pictures
After more than three decades, I still look at photography constantly.
Not just wedding photography.
I still get excited by an image I have not seen before, by somebody using light in a way I would not have thought of, or by a photograph that makes me wonder how on earth they saw it coming.
That curiosity matters more to me than another badge.
The day I think I have seen everything is probably the day I should stop.
Fortunately, photography has been extremely uncooperative on that front.
The photographs come first
Recognition is lovely.
Experience is useful.
Qualifications are reassuring.
But none of them should be the most interesting thing about a photographer.
The photographs should be.
If you would rather look at those than read another paragraph about me, I completely understand.
In fact, I would recommend it.
And if the work feels like the right fit for your wedding, I would be delighted to hear what you have in mind.
For more about the honours and experience behind Visionaire, visit my awards and recognition page.
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