THE ORIGIN STORY

I didn’t set out to be a photographer. The camera came because of music. I was deep in the scene, small venues, sticky floors, 200-cap rooms where the PA was too loud and the lighting was terrible and the band was absolutely everything, and I wanted to hold onto it somehow. So I got a camera, and I started shooting.

That was the beginning of more than a decade in the music world. Grassroots gigs. Festivals. Bands I followed because I believed in what they were doing. I learned how to read a room, how to move without being noticed, how to wait for the moment. I learned that the best photographs don’t announce themselves, they just happen, and you’re either ready or you’re not.

“The best photographs don’t announce themselves, they just happen, and you’re either ready or you’re not.”

Three months that changed everything

In 2020, my life shifted completely. Within three months, I lost my dad and my daughter was born. Grief and joy, right next to each other. There’s no instruction manual for that kind of time. You just move through it the best you can, and you come out the other side a different person.

What pulled me through was running. I needed to change my health, my head, my habits, all of it. I started running, and running led me somewhere I hadn’t expected: into sport. Into the world of athletes and training and competition. Into a community of people who push themselves not because anyone’s watching, but because they have to.

I pointed the camera at it, and the instincts kicked in immediately.

The skills transferred

There was no relearning. That surprised me at first, and then it didn’t. Because sport and music, at the level I was shooting both, are actually the same problem. You are trying to capture something real, in real time, that will not happen again. A striker mid-air, a runner deep in emotion and a singer mid stage dive are asking exactly the same thing of you: be present, be ready, and stay out of the way.

Everything I’d built over a decade in dark venues and muddy festival fields translated directly. The patience. The ability to read what’s about to happen a half-second before it does. The instinct for light even when there isn’t much of it. The discipline to not shoot everything, to wait for the frame that actually says something.

“A runner mid race, full of emotion and a singer mid-note are asking exactly the same thing of you: be present, be ready, and stay out of the way.”

Why Hold Steady UK covers both

Hold Steady UK exists in both worlds, sport and musics, because I do. That’s not a business decision. It’s just an honest account of who I am and how I got here.

I shoot sport because it found me at a moment when I needed it, and it turned out I was built for it. I still shoot music because that’s where the camera and I first figured each other out, and I’m not ready to let that go. I also have a deep rooted emotional connection with music. Both teach you the same lesson, over and over: real moments cannot be staged. You can prepare for them, you can position yourself well, you can be technically ready, but when it happens, it happens, and your job is simply not to miss it.

That’s what I’m trying to do with every frame, in every venue and on every field, and at every event.

Nothing staged. Everything real.