I'm old enough to remember the EU butter mountain story. One chap who could benefit from it is Vipula Athukorale, a sri-lankan born chef now living in Leicester. I photographed him this week with some of his butter sculptures.

No problem with using lights as I had imagined-the 'butter' is actually pastry margarine and doesn't melt unless you heat it up.
Even so Vipula has to keep washing his hands in cold water as he works.

Here is an interesting story. Finally-we are all going to be replaced by robots!

No more moaning photographers to deal with. Just an occasional drop of oil and a quick lens polish.
Whats next-an automated Picture Editor?

Red lorry, yellow lorry-or even blue lorry.
I was asked to get a photo of the new TRM fleet colours up in Lancashire.
Always a proud moment for any firm when they roll out the new colours. TRM have a smashing factory near Ormskirk-a shiny steel silo full of starch and bright 'Kodak yellow' doors made a nice background and the silo had a ladder up the side. Perfect as a
high up camera platform and the white starch powder even did a good job on my shirt!

There may be nothing sweet about me, but Gabriella Cilmi who wrote that hit song when she was just fifteen is very sweet.
Along with my fellow photographer Bob Caddick, I was in London's Portobello Road last week to take photographs for 'The Age', a newspaper based in Melbourne. Of Italian heritage, Gabriella was born in Australia where they are very proud of her multi award winning talent. Her new album 'Ten' is due out next week and so we were asked to provide portrait shots before Gabriella heads out to sing at the Australian Grand Prix.

I have to confess here that I thought Gabriella's 'Nothing sweet about me' was an Amy Winehouse song! Their voices are very similar, but that is where the similarity ends. No need for me to have worried about any outrageous 'rock chick' behaviour.
Gabriella is a charming young lady who was generous with her time and quite happy to take a seven minute walk to a location I'd already checked out beforehand. It's was great to work with somebody who is so helpful and professional-not all singers are like that. We wish her every success with 'Ten'.

A high street in Northenden, Manchester. Busy with shoppers and people on their way to work. Lots of shops, restaurants and cafes and amongst them a 'shop' that appears to be abandoned and closed up.

It's not the first time I've visited a 'massage parlour'.
The last one had a blinking blue sign in a star shape and this one continued the theme with a star logo sign on the black shuttered window. Sandy's Superstars. Maybe the star signifies something?

I pushed the door open and walked nervously down the tiny corridor. At the end was a buzzer with speakerphone and a camera watching me. I pressed it and was told to push the door and come in. Once inside the place resembled a dentist's waiting room.
A dentist's waiting room with only male customers.

All along one wall there were photographs of scantily clad girls and a youngish woman sat behind a desk looking like receptionists all over the world. "Girls are on the right. Have you booked?" she asked me and the reporter from The Telegraph accompanying me. It's as this point that we fess up to working for a national newspaper and are shown the way out. Two large gentlemen sitting next to the receptionist utter expletives and pull their collars up to hide their faces just in case we have a hidden camera. We leave as instructed and reflect on the seedy side of life in the suburbs.

Here's a funny little job that I found for The Sunday Telegraph. Britain's first ever vacuum cleaner museum. Whilst there are plenty of museums with vacuum cleaners in them, this is the only one devoted solely to them.

The owner, James Brown, is a lovely bloke with a great sense of fun. He told me that he even vacuums the ceiling in his museum/shop at Eastwood, Nottinghamshire. That set me thinking, and together with my assistant I went in search of an apron so that we could photograph him doing just that and make it more of an amusing image.

The image is not photoshopped in any way,(other than levels and curves), although I admit that it does look like it has been.
It's the result of James leaping off a chair, (just at camera left out of the shot). An old trick, but it does work. He did it four times for me and six times for my assistant Sophie, which was very sporting of him.

I'm thinking maybe I need an obsession like that to fill the vacuum in my life,(sorry, only joking-I couldn't resist). CLICK below for the Telegraph audio test with James...(By the way-he identified them all correctly).

Funny how things often get missed on a quick edit.
In this job, time is often a luxury which means that perfectly good photos get missed and sit languishing on the back up storage drives. My photo of a steel mill worker is one such photo. The shoot was about one of the workers in particular, not this chap. But I shot it on the hoof anyway because he had an interesting face and like most of them in the mill, an interesting story.

Working in a steel rolling mill is hot, noisy and dangerous work. The chap on my photo is the safety man-it's his job to shut down the furnace if anything goes badly wrong. He has survived a close encounter with molten strip steel himself and lived to tell the tale. While I was there with my assistant Bob there was a problem with red hot steel wrapping itself around the rollers and halting production for several hours. If you can imagine a strip of incandescent metal whipping around, it will give you some idea of the danger. I even experienced it myself when I stood next to what looked like a pile of metal rods. They were not red hot, but the heat coming through the side of my safety boots made me realise they were still capable of burning a hole in the unwary!

Sorry-I couldn't resist after my last post. The original Apple Mackintosh 128K personal computer which I photographed this week.

I just bought a new MacBook after my old one died at nearly four years old. I'm pleased with the new machine, but that may change after tomorrow when Apple bring out this new tablet. Nobody is sure of the name yet.....i-slate,i-tablet,i-reader, whatever. The idea is that the tablet will replace paper print and that newspapers, books etc. may do a deal with Apple to produce content which can then be paid for online and downloaded to the tablet reader.
It should be very interesting to watch what happens and whether or not this device gallops to the rescue of falling newspaper and magazine sales.