In January 2024, I was chosen to be the official photographer accompanying the Duke of Edinburgh’s official royal visit to the tiny Atlantic island of St Helena.
I was hired by the team at FINN Partners and worked closely with the tourism dept in the St Helena government as well as the local police, UK police protection officers and the royal press office to send coverage across the newswires as quickly as possible.
The story of Prince Edward, Duke of Edinburgh meeting Jonathan, the 192-year-old tortoise was the most viral of the stories put out by the PR team at FINN. It appeared in The Telegraph, The Daily Mail, Tatler, Hello Magazine and Forbes, among many others. In total there were nearly 500 individual pieces of press about the trip, each including images taken by me.
I was hired as the official photographer on Intrepid’s press trip to Albania.
The aim was to capture images that could be used both for Intrepid’s marketing of the holiday as well as the media stories produced by the journalists on the trip.
Resulting coverage ended up in Wanderlust Magazine, Family Traveller, City AM, Prima Magazine, Travel Weekly and The Guardian.
The reason trip-specific photography worked so well in this instance is because these publications have little or no budget for photos. Instead of using low-cost agencies like Shutterstock and ending up with fairly generic-looking or over-saturated images, the picture editors have a pool of photos to choose from that were taken on the same research trip. I was paid by Intrepid who made them free-to-use to the publications. The overall effect is of much more cohesive storytelling.
I wrote an article for Travel Weekly about the trip ( as well as my overland journey to Albania with Byway).
I was also able to use one the of the experiences for my regular column in GreenTraveller magazine about responsible photography. Plus I wrote a piece for Intrepid's Blog, Good Times, about the people I met on the trip.
You can also take a look at some photo stories from the trip: Karavasta Lagoon, a walking tour of old Tirana, dinner in the Tragjas mountains, visiting the Adriatik family, the hilltop citdel of Berat, Tirana and Vlore.
Just because you can take a photo, does it automatically mean you should? In a world where nearly everyone has access to a camera and photo sharing is as easy as a couple of swipes, photography is changing the world and the way we experience it.
I’ve always been fascinated by how photography impacts the places I visit – people, landscapes, culture. For my MSc thesis, I compared and contrasted how both words and pictures used in travel publishing dealt with environmental issues in holiday destinations. It’s with this knowledge in mind that I’ve regularly been writing a feature for The GreenTraveller Magazine on the topic of responsible photography.
