Gary Williamson is a street and portrait photographer from Lancashire who has been blind for over 35 years. Here's what he shared on Sunday Night Live about how he works, how he edits and why he watches the light rather than the person.
Three weeks into bird photography with the Canon EOS R5 Mark II and a 400mm f/2.8, and I've realised I'm treating birds exactly the same way I treat portraits.
This was the first time I've ever photographed a moonrise. First time I've ever done anything like it, if I'm honest. So I went out with my great friend Ben Kapur, and he showed me the ropes. Ben had done all the planning beforehand with an app called PhotoPills, plus a few other little things he knows, so in theory we knew exactly where the moon would come up behind a church in the distance.
In theory. The night itself didn't go quite to plan. Even with all that planning, we still stood there doubting ourselves. "We're in the wrong place." So we sprinted one way, then a few moments later sprinted back the other. We expected to see the moon a lot sooner than it actually turned up, and while we couldn't see it the doubt kept growing. "That's cloud. Please, no." Then the moon was up.
I never thought it would be anywhere near as exciting as it was. Who would have thought photographing the moon could be so much fun? What a night.
Both Ben and I were shooting on the Canon EOS R5 Mark II. Ben was on a 500mm EF lens. I was using the Canon EF 400mm f/2.8 L IS III, on loan from Canon for the time being, with the EF to RF adapter and a 1.4x teleconverter on the back of it. It's a fabulous lens. Absolutely fabulous lens.
The reason for all that focal length is simple. The longer you go, the more the compression kicks in, and that's what makes the moon look so enormous against the church. That's the whole trick, really.
Ben's ideal numbers going in were around 1/200 sec, f/8, and ISO as low as I could manage. That's the plan you'd write down before you leave the house. But by the time the moon actually showed itself, the ambient light had dropped a lot, so I ended up at 1/125 sec, f/5.6, ISO 2500.
Now, ISO 2500 is absolutely nothing for a modern camera. But the scene was so dark that when I lifted the exposure later, there was a fair bit of noise to deal with. More on that in a minute.
One thing worth saying: this is a single shot. I didn't focus separately on the church and the moon and blend them together. I wanted one single frame, with just a little bit of poetic licence added afterwards.
Ben said it's amazing if you can get the moon sitting perfectly behind the church, and we did get that. But once the craziness had calmed down and I was looking back through them on the camera, I kind of preferred the frame with the moon off to the left-hand side of the church, not dead centre behind it. That's the one I chose for the final image.
Noise reduction with DxO PureRAW 6. I'm not a fan of Lightroom's own noise reduction, and there's definitely better software out there. For me that's DxO PureRAW 6, hands down the best RAW conversion there is (and no, this isn't a promotional plug). I ran the file through it using DeepPRIME XD3, which cleans up the noise and sorts out lens sharpness, vignetting, chromatic aberration and distortion in one go. It spits out a DNG that goes straight back into Lightroom, which is where I'm comfortable working.
Adaptive Color, then pulling the brightness back. In Lightroom I set the profile to Adaptive Color, which I love, then toned the overall brightness down. That's about it for the global edit.
Bringing the brick detail back with High Pass. Here's the catch with noise reduction. On a small, distant, detailed subject like a church, it smooths away the fine brick detail along with the noise. That's just unavoidable. So in Photoshop I duplicated the layer, ran a High Pass filter at around a 5 pixel radius, and set that layer to Hard Light. That sharpens the edges hard. The trouble is it would sharpen the sky too and leave halos, so I hid the whole thing behind a black mask, selected just the church with the Object Selection tool, and filled the selection with white on the mask so the detail shows on the brickwork only. Sky stays clean, no haloing.
A touch of glow on the moon. I just wanted to add a little glow to the moon, so I merged everything to a new layer, ran the Camera Raw Filter as a smart filter, and used its Glow. The default Diffusion style made the moon detail disappear, and Halation didn't really give me much, so I settled on Bloom. I kept it very subtle, because the moon already looks unreal at that size.
Adding the birds. A few minutes before this frame, a group of birds flew across the front of the cameras, with exactly the same composition. So I borrowed them. I made two versions of this image, one with birds and one without. There were six birds in the source frame, but I used five, because I don't like even numbers. I lassoed them, dropped them onto their own layer, and lined them up where they'd been. To lose the grey sky around them I used Blend If, dragging the bright slider on the current layer until the sky dropped out, then splitting that slider with Alt or Option to soften the edges (not too far, or bits of the original background start creeping back). They were still a bit bright and didn't look right, but you can't select them cleanly while Blend If is only hiding the sky. So I merged that layer with an empty one, which turns it into a normal cutout layer, then loaded the selection, filled it with black to darken the birds, and brought the layer down to about 80% opacity.
A final crop. Back into Lightroom for a crop, and that was that. Told you it wasn't much.
I really enjoyed this. It's so good getting out and trying different things, and I owe Ben a big thank you for leading me through the whole night. I'm really looking forward to doing it again next month, maybe in a different location, and before then I need to get properly familiar with PhotoPills myself.
So here's my question for you. Have you ever shot a moonrise, and if you have, where would you send me next?
A quick update on how I'm getting on with the wildlife photography. Short version: I'm really loving it.
A week or so back I was out early with my mate Ben Kapur at the local reservoir, hoping for another go at the resident Kingfisher. Conditions were about as good as it gets. A cool start at 3 degrees, mist sitting right across the water, and beautiful light as the sun crept up over the horizon. Photography aside, it was just a treat to be stood there.
The Kingfisher though? No-show. Almost two hours and nothing. But it was only my second time out, so any time with the camera in hand is a win, and I came away really happy with a Heron, a Great Crested Grebe and a Black-Headed Gull. I had the big lens (400mm f/2.8) on a little table top tripod fitted with one of my spare 3 Legged Thing video heads, and it works an absolute treat.
The one thing is the height I've been using it at is a little bit high, so if a bird goes up I'm going to struggle to get it in shot. My dear friend Steve Healy gifted me a Platypod Extreme, so I'm going to be trying that next time.
Then I spent a day at Seaton Wetlands with my friend Andy. Weather was all over the place, light rain most of the morning, nothing like we'd been promised the day before. The Merlin app was going mad there was that much about, and I'm already picking out birds I couldn't have named a week ago. The Kingfisher was there when we got in the hide, then made his escape, never to be seen again. Typical. Still, I got a lovely female Stonechat, and plenty of practice using the camera like a Game-Boy, dialling in settings as it all unfolds in front of you.
A Black-Headed Gull sequence even became a YouTube video, putting a bird in flight together in Photoshop, no AI.
What I'm loving is the quiet, the early light, and the slow pace and anticipation. The Kingfisher's still the one I'm after though.
Gear and settings:
Canon R5 Mark II
Canon EF 400mm f/2.8 III with 1.4x Converter
Heron: 1/400 sec, f/4.0, ISO 2000
Great Crested Grebe: 1/2000 sec, f/4.0, ISO 2500
Black-Headed Gull: 1/2500 sec, f/4.0, ISO 1000
Female Stonechat: 1/2000 to 1/2500 sec, ISO 4000
One for you thought …
How do you set up low down with a big lens, and does anyone use a Platypod for wildlife?
I'm all ears.
I've wanted to have this conversation with Dave Clayton on the live for a while. The two of us talk about AI a lot when it's just us, and because he's a graphic designer rather than a photographer, he comes at it from a slightly different place to me, which always gets me thinking. So for this week's Sunday Night Live I got him on to do it properly, and the whole conversation is in the video above.
If you don't know Dave, he's been working in design and marketing for over 30 years. He's spoken at Photoshop World six times, taught at Adobe MAX, written How Do I Do That in InDesign, he's an Adobe Community Expert, and he's designed all of my book covers. Back in 2018 we did the He Shoots He Draws podcast together, which is now closing in on 330,000 downloads.
That was the first thing I asked him, and for Dave it's a tool, at least for now. His view is that the AI itself isn't what will take work away from him; if anything does, it'll be someone in his field who knows how to use it. He also made the point that "AI" has become one word for a whole load of different things, in the same way that anything odd-looking in a photo used to just get called Photoshop.
I asked him how he feels, as someone who teaches InDesign, about people asking ChatGPT how to do something instead of coming to him, and he's relaxed about it; he can't stop it, and he'd rather people learnt however works for them. My own feeling is that AI is just another teacher in the mix, the same as the hundreds of people teaching Photoshop on YouTube, where some will click with you and some won't. Dave's warning was that it can be just as wrong as a person can. He's had it send him to a tool that had nothing to do with the job, and his name for it is "average intelligence", because all it's really doing is handing you back the average of what's already out there.
He won't let AI make the finished piece of work. He'll use it for research, or to get a feel for what an idea might look like before he goes off and makes it himself. The one time he used AI-generated elements in a final piece was a poster for a client on a tight budget who wanted a very specific look; he had AI make the individual pieces in that style, then put them together in Photoshop and built the poster in InDesign.
He also shared a test he'd seen on Instagram that I really like. If you'd feel ashamed telling someone you used AI for something, that's how you know you shouldn't have.
Dave breaks his use into admin, corrective and generative. For admin and ideas he uses ChatGPT and Claude, often by voice while he's driving, so the time in the car isn't wasted. Inside the Adobe apps he sticks mostly to the corrective tools, plus the new AI Assistant in InDesign, which he used to build a table for a wedding. It doesn't generate anything; it uses InDesign's own functions for you, and you can watch what it's doing as it goes. When he teaches people to drop a generated image into a layout as a placeholder, he then has them search Adobe Stock with generative AI excluded, so a photographer gets paid for the picture that's actually used.
For me it's mostly admin. I've got a small team of AI assistants set up in Grokbot, each with its own job. One gives me a rundown of my day at seven every morning and drafts replies to my emails in my voice, which it learnt by going through a year of my sent emails, though it never sends anything itself. Another checks that sponsorship requests are genuine before I even look at them, one looks after travel, and another goes through YouTube, X and elsewhere every day to see what people are asking about and struggling with. Between them they save me hours, and it's a big part of why I've been out with the camera so much more lately.
If you'd like to try it without going that far, give AI your to-do list and ask it to remind you each day until you tell it something's done. I told mine to remind me about my car's MOT in eleven months' time, and now I don't have to think about it.
Dave was quick to point out the trade-off, which is that for AI to do all that, it has to know a lot about you. My own view is that a lot of what's out there about us was out there long before AI came along; if you want to see how much, Proper Honest Tech has a really good video showing what Amazon has worked out about you from your purchases alone.
Ben and I went out on the Sunday evening to try to photograph the moon rising behind a building he knew, and the cloud got in the way. We got talking about whether we'd ever photograph the building and the moon separately and put them together in Photoshop. We both could, but neither of us wants to, because the whole thrill is getting it in one frame. Dave summed it up perfectly; nobody's ever going to sit their grandchildren down to tell them about a great prompt they once wrote, but they will tell them about the day they went out and got the shot.
Dave's position is that if all you've done is type a prompt, or had another AI write the prompt for you, nobody owns what comes out, and that includes AI images people are selling on stock sites. I had my own moment with this on Spotify. I'd been really enjoying a country artist called Kane Walker, then one day in the car I wondered whether it was AI, looked it up, and it was. I haven't listened since.
We also talked about Artcraft, the AI-built copy of Adobe's software. I understand the frustration behind it, but copying Adobe felt like a temper tantrum to me, and I'd far rather someone built a genuine alternative and invited people to use that. Building things with AI can be brilliant, though. I recently had Gemini recreate Stunt Rider, a game I loved on my Amstrad as a kid, and in about fifteen minutes I was playing it again, purely for fun.
In December 2024 the government ran a consultation on letting AI companies train on anyone's work, photos included, without asking or paying unless the creator had opted out. Creatives pushed back hard, and on the 18th March the government told Parliament the idea had been overwhelmingly rejected and that it no longer has a preferred option. It's set up four working groups instead, and on the 9th October a creative industries summit in Salford launched the Manchester Principles, a draft of 29 rules on licensing, crediting creators and tracking where content comes from. None of it is law yet, so nothing has changed in either direction.
Dave's answer on whether AI companies should need permission and pay was a firm yes. They're making a fortune from work they took for free, then charging us credits to use what they built from it, and one of Dave's own books was among those used for training.
He also told me about a design studio that runs its ideas past AI, and if AI comes back with the same idea they had, they scrap it and do something else. It reminded me of helping out at a wedding years ago, when the verger told me exactly where everybody takes the photo as the couple come out of the church. My answer was that I wouldn't be doing that one then, and the look I got said it all.
"One thousand percent" was Dave's answer. His comparison was synthesisers; when they arrived, everyone said musicians were finished, and what actually happened is musicians added synthesisers to everything they already did. He also mentioned that Firefly now lets you train a model on your own work so it creates in your style, which raises the obvious question of what stops someone training it on somebody else's.
I'm very much in favour of AI, but in the way I use it. It's an assistant for my admin, and in my editing I only use it to correct, remove or select something I could do by hand but that would take ages, so I've got more time for the creative side. I'll never let it take that part away from me, and I'm not a fan of people calling themselves AI artists.
Somebody told me recently to make sure I don't fill the time it gives me back with more work, and Dave said the same: go for a walk, spend time with the people you love, shop locally. Not long ago it did a job for me in about half an hour that would have taken me a full day, so Anne and I went out for coffee and lunch, and when we got back it was finished.
The title is the one you gave the live, so swap it for the YouTube title if it's different. I left out the names of people in the chat, and kept Dave's personal story about his mum out as well.
Headed out early yesterday morning to photograph sunrise on the coast, with the tail end of the recent storms still hanging around.
The plan was Charmouth, but when we got there not much was happening, so we carried on down to West Bay. Very glad we did.
We (me and my friend Ben Kapur) got ourselves into position knowing where the sun would be coming up. It looked good, but the light was so flat. There were clouds, but the sky was just grey and featureless.
Then, all of a sudden, the sun broke through right at the turn of high tide. We had this amazing glow coming from behind the cliff face, which ws most definitely a reward for the early start 😍
It just goes to show... don't give in, and don't pack your camera away too soon. You never know what's going to happen.
I shot this on the RF 28-70mm f/2. It's not really a landscape lens, but as I've only just changed over to Canon, it's what I had with me. Something like the 70-200mm Ben was using would have been great.
I'm now building up the lenses I need to cover my portraits, seascapes and my wildlife photography.
Next on the list is a 70-200, and I'll probably go for the f/2. I'm also likely to get the 14-35mm f/4 rather than the 15-35mm f/2.8. I'd only ever use it for landscapes, and I'll more than likely be at around f/8 anyway, so I wouldn't benefit from the f/2.8.
Anyway, a fantastic morning.
It felt so good to get out and see the start of the day.
Mornings are definitely my favourite part of the day, especially when a scene like this unfolds in front of you.
Kit Used:
Canon R5 Mark II
Canon RF 28-70mm f/2
NiSi 5-Stop ND (JetMag Pro)
Printed on Fotospeed NST Bright White using my Canon Pro-1100.
Photoshop has had a facelift. Not a new tool, not another AI button. The actual look of the thing, the panels and pickers you stare at all day, redrawn for the first time in over a decade.
It's in the beta for now, so if you want a go you'll need to install the Photoshop beta from your Creative Cloud app. A "modern UI" option had been sitting in Technology Previews for a while, but it only touched a handful of dialogs. The real change arrived with beta 27.12.0 at the start of October, and it's carried on through 28 and 28.0.1 since.
Adobe are calling this the first phase of a refreshed interface, "the first significant refinement of Photoshop's UI in more than a decade". It's built on Spectrum, their own design system, and the point of it is a Photoshop that's easier to read and sits consistently alongside Lightroom, Bridge and Premiere.
You see it first in the toolbar. There's more space between things, the icons have been redrawn and cleaned up, and the active tool now stands out with stronger contrast so you can tell at a glance what you've got selected. The options bar along the top gets the same treatment. One change you'll notice straight away: tool groups open on hover now, rather than the old click-and-hold with a tiny triangle as the only clue there was more underneath. Not keen? You can turn that bit off in Settings or Preferences > Tools, by unticking "Show Tool Groups on Hover in the toolbar".
The Colour Picker has changed the most. You now get two rows of recently used swatches under the colour field, pulled from the same recents as your Swatches panel. HSB and RGB are still there, and CMYK has moved into a drop-down on the right. The real benefit is simple: mix a colour, carry on working, then come back to it later and it's sitting right there in your recents.
Curves, Levels, Hue/Saturation and the gradient fill layer have all been reworked too. Smoother look, clearer colour cues, better contrast. Here's the part that matters though: they all work exactly as they did before. Nothing has moved in terms of what the sliders actually do. The big visual change is that the old channel and colour-range drop-downs are now rows of little coloured circles. So on Hue/Saturation, for example, the slider tracks are coloured, which means you can see what Hue is about to do before you move anything. Adobe say 24 panels and pickers have had this first-phase treatment in all.
Slightly separate from the new look, and it actually landed a few weeks earlier, is Quick Compare. You'll find it at the bottom of the toolbar, under Quick Mask (the little split rectangle). Click it and Photoshop shows you "before", meaning how the image looked when you opened it this session, against "after". Single view flips between the two. Split view gives you a draggable divider, and zoom and pan both work. Click again to come back out. No more hiding layers or digging through the History panel just to see what you've changed.
Go to Settings on a Mac, or Edit > Preferences on Windows, then Interface. Right at the bottom there's an Options section with "Enable Modern User Interface". Underneath it is "Enable Modern Color User Interface", which only does anything if the first one is already on. So you can have the new layout on its own, or the new colours as well. Don't get on with it? Same place to switch it all back off.
A few people on Adobe's own forum have reported teething problems, which is exactly what a beta is for. Some have seen tool flyouts not displaying properly, jumping between the top and bottom tool so you can't reach the ones in the middle (Adobe have that marked as in development). Others have reported the coloured circles showing the wrong colours, or in the wrong order (Adobe's first suggestion there is to reset your beta preferences). A few have found tool groups going back to the first tool on relaunch rather than the last one you used (Adobe's director of product management for Photoshop has replied to say they'll look into it).
My own take? I like it. I like seeing the thing move forward, and it shows there's real work going into a platform I use and love. I've been running it in beta and pre-release, and yes, it takes a bit of getting used to. But once you're familiar with it you're moving just as quickly as before, if not quicker. I'm all for it, and I'm leaving it on.
As for when it lands properly, Adobe haven't officially said. Adobe MAX runs from the 10th to the 12th November, and this is exactly the sort of thing they tend to announce there. I'll let you know the moment I hear, along with anything else from MAX worth knowing about.
So, over to you. When the new look turns up in front of you, are you the sort who'll switch it straight on and get used to it, or will you want it off and stick with the Photoshop you know?
Yesterday I photographed Storm Austen out on the Cobb at Lyme Regis with my mates Ben Kapur and Steve. Healy.
We caught the tail end of it. No strong winds, but the waves were rolling in quite impressively as the high tide peaked. Ben was raised in Lyme, so he knew exactly where we should stand to be out of harms way. The Cobb curves, and there's a spot where the waves just don't reach. Where we stood was completely dry.
So there we were, having a brilliant time photographing the sunset as it lit up the clouds, with the waves crashing hard against the Cobb. Then there were the others. Some folk thought it perfectly sensible to walk the length of the Cobb and stand right at the far end. They ran the gauntlet as the waves crashed against the wall, towered up above them, then came crashing down.
With my mate, Ben Kapur
One person even climbed the steps in the distance and appeared up on top of the Cobb with their dog on a lead. Thankfully they realised it wasn't a good idea and beat a hasty retreat.
So yeah, I photographed Stupid yesterday. Glad to say he got back safely. But has he learned a lesson? I doubt it.
Canon R5 Mark II
Canon RF 14-35mm f/4
f/8
1/2 second exposure
ISO 100
NiSi 6-stop ND filter (JetMag Pro)
I’ve very recently started getting into wildlife photography, as something different to do when I’m not taking portraits, and over the past week or so I’ve been out as much as I can photographing birds at a local reservoir and wetlands.
From one of the first shoots I put together a composite of a black-headed gull flying across the water; it’s the same bird at seven stages of its flight, brought together into one image in Photoshop. Since sharing it I’ve been asked a few times how I made it, so this is how.
The gull was photographed on my Canon EOS R5 Mark II with the Canon EF 400mm f/2.8L IS III, which is so good; razor sharp and super fast. Zoom into any of the frames and the detail on the bird is unbelievable.
None of this could have been done in one shot. As the gull flew across the water I panned the camera to my right to follow it, keeping the bird in the middle of the frame the whole time, and you can see that in the water if you flick through the frames, because the ripples all run the way I was panning. Every frame has the gull sat bang in the centre, so the job in Photoshop is cutting each one out and spreading them across the picture.
I picked out the seven frames I wanted and, before anything else, renamed them Gull 1 through to Gull 7. I highlighted all seven, right-clicked and chose Rename 7 Photos, then picked Custom Name and Sequence from the dropdown, gave it a name, set the starting number to 1 and clicked Apply.
It’s a small thing, but when you’re dipping in and out of Lightroom it means you can see straight away which frame you need next.
I didn’t do any editing in Lightroom at all; Gull 1 went straight over to Photoshop with File > Edit In > Edit in Photoshop.
Gull 1 ends up on the far left of the composite, with the others running across to the right, so the bird needs moving out of the middle of the frame.
It works like this. Grab the Object Selection tool, click on the bird and Photoshop makes a selection of it. The reflection in the water needs to come along too, so hold Shift and drag a box over it to add it to the selection, and it picked that up really well.
Now expand the selection a touch with Select > Modify > Expand; 5 pixels is plenty. You’ll see the selection jump outwards when you click OK, and that’s what you want, because it means there won’t be a faint outline or a few stray bits left behind once the bird’s been moved and the original removed.
Command+J (Ctrl+J on Windows) then puts the bird and its reflection on a layer of their own.
The original bird on the background layer still needs to go. There are lots of ways to do it, but I wanted to do this one without AI, so I used good old Content-Aware Fill.
Hold Command and click the cutout layer’s thumbnail to load the selection back in, make sure the background layer is the active one, then go to Edit > Content-Aware Fill. The green overlay is the area Photoshop is sampling from, and if you want it to consider more of the water you can add to it with the plus brush; I gave it a bit more above the bird. Set the output to Current Layer, click OK and deselect.
The bird’s gone, and it’s done a really good job of it without any AI at all.
With the cutout layer selected, hold Shift and drag it over to the left. Shift keeps it on the same horizontal line, so the bird stays at exactly the same height above the water and looks as though it was always in that part of the picture.
These are quicker, because from each of them I only need the bird and not the background.
Gull 2 goes over to Photoshop, Object Selection tool on the bird, Shift and drag to add the reflection, expand by 5 pixels and Command+J. Drag that layer across into the composite with Shift held down and it drops in at the same height it was in the original frame, so all that’s left is sliding it into position. Close the frame without saving and on to the next one.
You can send all seven frames over to Photoshop in one go and have them open as tabs, but that feels a bit messy to me, so I did them one at a time.
With all seven gulls in, it was looking pretty cramped, so the picture needed to be wider.
Generative Expand would do that these days, but you get a lower resolution result, and it’s easy to forget there’s technology in Photoshop we’ve had for years that’ll do it at the original resolution. In this case that’s Content-Aware Scale.
Unlock the background layer first, then use the Crop tool to drag the canvas out wider and give the birds a bit more breathing space, with the fill option in the options bar set to transparent. The birds are all on their own layers and don’t get touched; it’s only the background layer, the water, that gets stretched.
With the background layer active, go to Edit > Content-Aware Scale, hold Option (Alt on Windows) and drag the middle handle on the left side outwards. Holding Option stretches the right side by the same amount, so both sides fill in equally.
Photoshop is stretching what’s already there as you drag, but not to the point where you’d really notice. Zoom into the ripples afterwards and they look perfect, and because there’s no generative fill involved, it’s still the original resolution of the image.
The last job is spacing the birds evenly across the width. You could do it by eye, but guides make it much easier.
Go to View > Guides > New Guide Layout, ignore the rows, set Columns to 8 and the gutter to 0. That gives you seven guides across the image plus the ones on the outer edges, so there’s one for each gull. Drag each bird onto its guide, then clear them with View > Guides > Clear Canvas Guides.
That’s it, and the seven gulls are now spread evenly across the water.
You could carry on from there and darken the water down so the birds stand out a bit more, but the composite itself is done, and none of it needed the latest AI features; Content-Aware Fill and Content-Aware Scale have been in Photoshop for years, and they’re more than capable.
Sean Tucker was my guest on Sunday Night Live this week, and it’s one of those conversations I’ve not stopped thinking about since. We were both on the Wex Photo Video roadshow over the summer but never got the chance to sit down and talk properly while we were there, so this was the chance, and I’m really glad we took it, because it went somewhere very different to my usual interviews; hardly anything about settings or kit, and nearly all of it about why we take pictures in the first place.
Sean’s route into photography is about as unconventional as they come. In his twenties he was working for the church in South Africa, and because, in his words, the church doesn’t pay brilliantly, he started making little promotional videos for businesses on the side, so it was actually video before it was photography. He left the church around 2009 at thirty years old, with ten years sunk into one career and everything to start again.
A good friend told him that if he had to start from scratch, he might as well start with something he loved. What followed was at least three years of waiting tables while picking up bits of photo and video work, then a job as in-house product photographer for Yuppiechef, a kitchenware company in South Africa. After moving back to the UK in 2012 it was more product work, furniture this time, for around four years, then head of photography and video across Europe, the Middle East and Africa for the consultancy Oliver Wyman, which he was quick to point out mostly meant office headshots and talking-head interviews. His last full-time job was in 2018.
He’s self-taught as well, all of it from YouTube and blogs. He’d already done a psychology degree and four years of theology at seminary and couldn’t face going back to studying, which is a big part of why he started his own channel; it was a way of giving something back to the people coming up behind him. Being self-taught myself, that one struck a chord.
Everyone I spoke to while I was researching Sean said the same thing, that it’s his outlook people love. He’s happy to teach technique and give you the numbers if you want them, but he felt there was already plenty of that online and a real gap for people talking about why you’d pick up a camera at all.
He’s met so many photographers who’ve finally bought the camera and lens they wanted for years, watched a thousand tip videos on how to use it, and still have no idea what to point it at. That’s the bit he’s interested in. What have you got to say that only you can say, and why would you choose this subject over that one?
His own why is really specific. Having had partners and family members with severe anxiety, he wants whatever he makes, whether it’s a portrait, a film or something he’s written, to turn the volume down slightly on people’s anxieties about where they fit in the world. In his book The Meaning in the Making he uses a line from the pastor Frederick Buechner [CHECK: spelling], the gist of which is that you belong where your deep joy and the world’s deep hunger meet. Find the thing you love doing, then point it at something in the world that’s a bit broken.
This is where I found myself nodding along, because his approach to portraits is so close to mine. It starts with a cup of tea or coffee in his little garage studio, chatting until that’s run its course, so that by the time the camera comes out you at least know who he is. He shows people the pictures as he goes and keeps it collaborative, but he’s upfront by email beforehand that his lighting is moodier and shadowier, it’s not everyone’s favourite, and if it’s not for you he’ll happily point you to someone else.
The bit I loved was a trick he stumbled on while shooting headshots for drama students in his flat in London [CHECK: which drama school; the transcript says “Ryder’s”]. One of them told him about an exercise where every student was given an animal to embody on stage, with no talking allowed, and they’d had to be a flamingo. From then on, whenever a session with someone from that class started to flag, he’d ask what their animal was, and suddenly they’d be laughing about having to be an elephant and the life came straight back behind the eyes. Find the thing someone loves and get them talking about it.
I was taught something very similar years ago, to imagine everyone you meet has four letters written on their forehead, MMFI, make me feel important. Get people talking about themselves and the things they care about, and they relax.
I asked where his look comes from, because like mine you won’t find anything happy clappy in his work, and he knew straight away; it’s the old painters. When he lived in London he’d sit in Room 22 at the National Gallery with the Rembrandts. What gets him about Rembrandt is that he didn’t flatter anyone. Other painters of the time would happily knock fifteen years off you, but Rembrandt leaned into age and character and the texture of skin, and Sean thinks that makes a portrait you look at for longer. He was honest that it’s a brave thing to want as a sitter, and that having been self-conscious about his own skin when he was younger, he understands why people are wary of it.
The other thing Rembrandt taught him was that there’s one light, a single bank of window light with shutters opened and closed. Sean had been through all the usual stages, starting with two speedlights at equal power either side of the face, which filled every shadow and left everything flat, then on to five, six and seven lights with gels, before the penny dropped that it’s about taking things away. These days it’s one strong light, and if there’s a second, it’s a rim light at very low power, because for him shadow is shape. Shooting street in harder light bled back into his portraits too, so his modifiers have got smaller over the years; soft light is forgiving, and the better he got at using light, the more he leaned into the harder stuff.
I told him it felt like he’d been stalking me, which it genuinely did.
The idea I’ve thought about most since is that his work comes directly out of who he is. When he started on the street it was with his phone, getting off the Tube a stop early and walking home, photographing anything he found interesting. After a while themes started to show up; single figures on their own in urban spaces, in interesting light and shadow. He’d have told you he just liked the look of it, until people on Instagram kept saying it reminded them of Edward Hopper, who he’d never heard of.
Hopper painted isolated figures in New York at a time when the city was booming, which is a choice, so perhaps he was painting how cities feel rather than how they look. Sean’s an INFJ on the Myers-Briggs, the person reading a book in a quiet café rather than shouting at the football in a loud pub, and the one walking down the quiet street one over from the busy one. Looking at his pictures again, he realised he might be photographing his own experience of cities, and in a sense photographing himself. Once he knew that, he could make the work on purpose.
He compared it with his friend Andre [CHECK: surname spelling; the transcript reads “Vachek”], a Czech conflict photographer. The two of them walked into Trafalgar Square one day to find chaos after a football match, with flares going off, and while Sean went and got a doughnut and stood at the side, Andre dived straight into the crowd and took a football to the face. Both of them made the pictures that suit how they’re wired.
His advice for anyone who doesn’t know what to photograph yet is to photograph everything for a month or two, then step back and see what themes are coming through, because there’s something in that.
I put it to him that an introvert doing portraits and street photography seemed a bit odd; surely he’d be off somewhere quiet doing wildlife. His answer was that people confuse introvert with shy, when it’s really about how you recharge. After a bad day an extrovert goes out with friends to blow off steam, while an introvert goes home, makes a cup of tea and gets on the sofa. He’s a fairly confident introvert who isn’t interested in small talk, he wants to go deep one on one, which is exactly what a portrait session is.
On the street he’s a fisher rather than a hunter. A hunter chases down characters, which is how you end up in confrontations. A fisher finds the space first, where the light and shadow are doing something, sets up the composition and waits to see who walks into it. Because he was there first, nobody shouts at him; the most he gets is someone apologising for walking into his shot, and he can joke that he’s been waiting half an hour for them. It made me think of Jay Maisel, who always said much the same about New York.
We got onto envy too. Sean’s view is that the minute you start caring about what you do and get a bit of a handle on it, you start looking round at the people who have what you don’t, the following or the success, and that comparison kills the joy. He used the line usually credited to Theodore Roosevelt, that comparison is the thief of joy.
His marathon analogy is one I’ll be borrowing. You plan your race around your body, your running style and the course, maybe easing off early because of a weak ankle and leaving something in the tank for the last couple of miles. Then on the start line there’s a bloke in a red t-shirt who annoys you for some reason, so you throw the plan out and sprint after him, and your race is shot. He might not even know you exist, but you’ll end up trying to second-guess the algorithm or copy what someone else does, and you won’t make the work only you can make.
He was brilliantly blunt about likes and follower counts. He’s got a bigger following than some Magnum photographers, which he called stupid, because he’s “not a shadow of the photographer they are”, and there are cats on Instagram with bigger followings than him. If it’s numbers you’re after, get naked or get a puppy, but don’t kid yourself your photography got any better.
Criticism comes down to two things for him; the person has to know what they’re talking about, and they have to care about him getting better. Meet both and they can be as harsh as they like. The part that stuck with me is that it works both ways, so if he’s going to tune out the person telling him he shouldn’t be a photographer, he has to tune out the people gushing that it’s the best picture they’ve ever seen as well, unless they pass the same two tests.
It reminded me of my bodybuilding days and a friend who coached me telling me that a true friend won’t let you get on stage. Everyone in the gym tells you that you look amazing; a true friend tells you your calves are lagging and you’re not ready yet.
Norman asked whether his background in philosophy and theology shapes his photography, and Sean said it does, though not in a preachy way. He puts out two Parable magazines a year, each with thirty to forty images and around 5,000 words, and one of them, Going Rural, is about moving from London to the North York Moors, how his photography had to change and how the move brought him more peace but also some loneliness. For him it’s all one thing really; photography, film and writing are all just communication.
He’d also just got back from Morocco, where he took twelve photographers through Chefchaouen, Fez and Marrakesh over nine days. Each of them had to present a set of images at the end that hung together as a set, not just their favourites from the trip, and those go into a magazine alongside everyone’s writing as a keepsake. The trips have been selling out within 24 hours of going live.
I did sneak in one technical question. He used to be an 85mm portrait shooter but felt too far away from the person, so he moved to a 50mm to be physically closer for the conversation, and lately he’s been playing with something nearer 40mm. If he could only have one prime it would be the 50, because it does street and portraits with no compromise. With one light it means being very precise, because the smallest move changes everything; very unforgiving, but very rewarding when you nail it.
On the street it’s mostly a little Ricoh GR IIIx, a 40mm equivalent that’s so nondescript nobody notices it, or on flatter days a Sony A7C with the Zeiss 55mm f/1.8, so he can separate people from the background with focus when the light won’t do it for him.
Ten years ago a conversation like this would probably have had me thinking get over yourself. I’d come from the gyms and door work, and I really struggled with the idea of calling myself an artist. That’s changed over time, particularly with the 39-45 Portraits Project, where the photography and editing I love met my fascination with Second World War history, and it felt like what I was meant to be doing. Hearing someone else who’s self-taught, and who’s found his way by trial and error, arrive at the same conclusions was a real bit of reassurance, and judging by the comments I wasn’t the only one who felt that.
I always finish by asking about the best advice a guest has been given, and Sean’s wasn’t about photography at all. It came from a mentor in South Africa who saw an angry, angsty twenty-something wanting meaningful things to happen quickly, and taught him patience. Things take longer than we think they should, and that’s normal; it doesn’t mean you’ve messed up. Just take the next step, then the next one, and don’t worry about the final form, because it’ll probably look different by the time you get there anyway.
© Glyn Dewis 2026
