Photographing 30 St Mary Axe, affectionately known as “The Gherkin” due to its unusual shape, is something I’ve been wanting to do ever since returning to London last Summer. The iconic 180m tall skyscraper in the heart of the City of London was designed by Sir Norman Foster and has recently become Britain’s most expensive office building after recently being purchased for a staggering £630million.

Rather than just shooting the building with a wide-angle lens and capturing conventional architectural photographs, I wanted to do something a little bit more creative. Therefore, I set myself a challenge of only using my 50mm 1.4 prime lens on my full frame camera. The abstract nature of the building makes capturing reflections relatively easy and it was fun to play around with different compositions as twilight approached.

Here’s a behind the scenes video of a shoot I did for Middle East Golfer magazine recently put together by an excellent fellow photographer Tutti Del Monte:

The Packard Plant is a collossal 40 acre site located on the east-side of Detroit which was once the manufacturing complex of the Packard Motor car company before closing in 1956. The enormous entanglement of rooms and crumbling facades serve as one of the city’s most grand ruins and sadly yet another symbolic embodiment of the decline of Detroit’s primary industrial base; the dilapidation of the site is pretty astounding.  You can find abandoned boats, cars, piles of clothes, shoes, toys, discarded furniture and much much more by exploring the vast corridors, atriums and assembly rooms.

In fact, the area has become a haven for urban explorers, grafitti artists and photographers who can wander through the twisted and cavernous buildings which were formerly home to 40,000 employees. I visited the Albert Kahn designed complex last weekend for the first time and was amazed by the rich array of subject matter to shoot; I literally could have spent days there!! Below are some of my favorite shots from the trip including this shot of me above taken by my friend Farzin whose shots you can see here.

Last week, I was commissioned to shoot the spectacular 260,000 sq foot Angel building in EC1 London for a retail advertisement to go into the magazine “Estates Gazette”.  Developed by Derwent London, the building is home to the head offices of Cancer Research UK and is centered around a magnificent atrium that rises up five stories through the heart of the building. The focus of this cavernous space is a huge, functional piece of furniture designed by architect Ian McChesney and is complemented by similarly unique pieces of sculpture, photography and artwork installations scattered throughout the lobby.

My brief was to bring some energy to the atrium space. After some scouting around the building, I chose to frame the shot for the ad from an elevated view on one of the top office floors. I also decided to use a long exposure to create some motion blur in the photograph which I think instills the resultant photograph with a greater sense of activity and dynamism (this also handily avoids any problems with model releases.) It was then just a case of being patient (one of a photographer’s greatest skills in my opinion) and waiting for a busy time of the day. Above is the resultant advert which ran over the weekend along with some other shots that I took on the day. Enjoy!