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I first met Johnny Dawes over 25 years ago. It was a chance meeting at a cliff called Millstone Edge in the Derbyshire Peak District or England, where we were both climbing on a beautiful summers evening. I say climbing, I was climbing, Johnny was doing something far more dynamic! Over the next few months I bumped in to Johnny a lot on the short Gritstone outcrops of Derbyshire and Staffordshire...

This is a piece about Stuff. We all love stuff. I particularly am a huge fan of useful stuff, stuff I can use in everyday scenarios. I've just got back from a holiday (my holidays are never really "just" holidays, I'm not one for sitting on a beach with a book) in Italy and with me I had quite a lot of new "stuff" not necessarily new to the market stuff, but new to me. After a week of climbing up...

    It’s January. Which in England usually means miserable wet days that seem to last for about 4 hours, then it gets dark again! It’s a day like that today. It started ok,  a smattering of blue peeping out behind the ominous black storm clouds brewing in the distance. But then high winds buffeted the trees out on the morning’s dog walk. But wind I can deal with. Around lunch time,...

The title’s not meant to sound rude, but somehow it does, well it does to me. Perhaps it’s just my schoolboy humour! F-stop is actually a Camera bag manufacturer from North America – “Not another camera bag manufacturer” I hear you moan, well no, not exactly. F-stop cater more for the photographer who find themselves outdoors, up mountains, on rivers, skiing, hiking, operating in harsh...

Saturday just happened to be a rest day from our Ice climbing trip to Cogne in Italy and as luck would have it, it was also the day the Campionato Italiano Assoluto de Sled-Dog 2012 rolled in to town. It's been a personal ambition of mine for a long time to photograph Dog Sledding. I first saw the sport in the San Juan mountains of Colorado on a cold January morning. I just caught a passing...

Just a quick blast to say I'm in the Cogne Valley ice climbing and taking a few snaps for a couple of brands. After an epic drive down yesterday through some pretty mild weather we eventually started to get a little frozen water around Chamonix. Through the tunnel to Italy, a Pizza stop in Courmayeur and a final 30 mins of hairpin corners and icy roads found us in Lillaz and our hotel. We all...

It’s nice to help out someone when you can, even a snotty nosed little kid who used to take great delight “power slamming” onto me from the age of about 5. Yep little Oli Edwards introduced himself by way of leaping off the end of the bed onto my sleeping form and as fate would have it landing right on top of the old crown jewels. I was speechless, breathless and felt decidedly sick – a...

I'd been looking forward to Christmas for quite a while. To put it simply I was knackered. All I wanted to do was spend some quality time with my partner Lucy, kick back, put my feet up, watch some crap telly and when my feet weren’t up take my dogs out for walks. To insure we didn't get distracted from relaxing, we'd booked a cottage up in Belford, Northumberland - for those of you who don't...

2011 has come and gone, I had a pretty good year, foreign trips interspersed with local and national jaunts to some great events and fabulous locations. Book, magazine and brochure shoots and a re-build of my website, but for me there was only one highlight. A highlight weighing in at around 40kg’s, brindle in color, solid in stature and suffering from separation anxiety syndrome arising from...

  My favourite lens would have to be… hmmm maybe not, perhaps it’s the… or at least it was? That would be a toughie! But to name my favourite lens right here, right now, today, would be very easy. That would be my Nikkor 50mm f/1.4G AF-S. It’s not a new lens to the market place or indeed even to my own camera bag, but it’s the lens I’m most enjoying using at the moment. The 50mm...