Out in my old stamping ground of Stratford-upon-Avon for The Daily Telegraph this week. It was to photograph the 42 pieces of silver from the Shropshire house associated with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's work 'The Hound of the Baskervilles'.

I'd been expecting silver soup tureens and such-but it turned out to be 'flatwear'. That's cutlery to you and me, and possibly knives and forks that the famous author had actually used himself. Each piece had the classic crest showing a hound with a spear through it and five drops of blood.

I've been out photographing the bank holiday madness on the roads this weekend. First it was off to Hemel Hempstead and the M1 roadworks-not much happening there so I checked on the internet and found there was a big tailback on the M4 near Newbury. By the time I got there the M4 was clear and running normally-apparently there was a fatal road traffic accident at 3 a.m and it had taken until 10 a.m. to get things back to normal. So much for up to date information from the traffic sensors!
Surely the M25 could be relied upon for a nice bank holiday jam, I thought-wrongly as it turned out. By now things were a little worse at Hemel back on the M1 and so I was able to get a photo of the traffic crawling along there through the roadworks.

So Ronnie O'Sullivan is in the snooker finals. Reminds me of the time I photographed him at The Crucible in Sheffield. It was a portrait for The Telegraph, and was all done in a hurry in his hotel room. Ronnie was charming-a real nice guy and as I left we shook hands. I got the negs developed then scanned and wired the film before heading back down south. Next day I was going away on holiday to Italy and I was pleased to see my photo of the snooker ace used nicely on the sports pages.
Two weeks later I went out on another assignment. Reaching into my camera bag I found a set of keys-somehow in the rush to get the photos, Ronnie O'Sullivan's hotel room keys had got knocked into one of the pockets!

It's been a long,long time since I photographed a jumble sale. Last time would have been for The Northants Evening Telegraph more years ago than I care to remember. This week I photographed a National Childbirth Trust sale for The Guardian-they are doing a story about buying secondhand to save on the horrendous cost of having children.

I'd forgotten just what an experience it is to try and photograph these events when they are in full swing. Everything was relatively quiet until the doors rumbled open on the stroke of one o'clock and the hordes descended on the bargains inside. Standing in the way of bargain hunters whilst trying to photograph them was a no-no and I found myself being swept along like a pebble on a beach.


Here's a shot from The Sunday Telegraph job in Redditch. Taken on a monopod held at arms length it shows the police tent covering the spot where the body of disabled 22-year-old James Hughes was found in a suitcase in his family's back garden.
The area was a hot landing zone for the media and I ended up getting my foot slammed in my own car door by a drunken moron who objected to our reporter knocking on his door and came out of the house to show his disapproval. Sadly the police would not have shown much sympathy with me if I had retaliated or tried to press charges for assault.
Earlier the same reporter had a stone thrown at him by another group of yobs-this time swilling cans of lager in their back garden in between shouting obscenities at the media.

This week I've photographed Saracens rugby player Richard Hill and also in an entirely unconnected job the famous school where the game of Rugby was invented. The first rugby portrait was a pretty rushed affair to be honest-as these jobs often are. Richard was squeezing The Guardian in between lots of other press interviews and photoshoots so I wasn't able to get a changing room shot as requested by the picture desk. Just five minutes outside The Saracens Hatfield Training Centre was all that was available.
Luckily for me it was a lovely sunny afternoon and with a nice cloudy sky to outline Richard Hill's 'chiselled out of stone' looks.

The second Rugby job was at the Warwickshire school,(Rugby of course!) I've driven past loads of times but never actually been inside the walls before. It's a lovely old place and I enjoyed meeting the pupils there and photographing some of them in the wonderfully atmospheric setting. The 2005 film 'Tom Brown's Schooldays' starring Stephen Fry was filmed there.


I couldn't resist getting a stock shot of the old desktops in one of the rooms. They are now displayed on the wall and carved with the names of former pupils.

This is one of the two MG X-power cars I drove last week in between photographing them for The Daily Telegraph.
I hadn't expected to get a chance to drive them, but X-Power boss William Riley thought I should get the full experience after photographing the production line near Tenbury Wells.
Wonderful cars, especially the supercharged 5.2 litre carbon-fibre bodied one. If I had a spare £90,000 then I would definitely place an order.

Will is a member of the famous Riley motoring dynasty. My wife's grandmother learnt to drive in a huge old Riley, and my own grandfather drove a police 'Pathfinder' Riley like the one in front on the poster. The MG X's are being built at the rate of six a month-with most so far going out to the USA. Meanwhile Nanjjing Automobile who bought the MG plant at Longbridge have yet to produce a single car.

A very amusing job for The Daily Telegraph on Thursday. It was a story about how a taxi driver mistook Stamford Bridge up in Yorkshire for Stamford Bridge football ground in London. His passengers included one of Earl Spencer's daughters-together with her friend she had planned to watch the Chelsea v Arsenal game, but because of the blunder they missed it. Now you would have thought that they would have realised that the car was headed north, not southwards-but Earl Spencer's daughter is from South Africa and her friend was from the USA. So that would be like asking a Brit if Durban is South of Joburg or to the north,(It's south of Johannesburg just in case you were wondering).

Together with the Sun's photographer I got quite excited when the Passat driver pictured did some very strange maneuvers to get away from our lenses. Sad to say he was just winding us up and the driver responsible only works at the weekend and drives an e-class mercedes,(it's not the driver in the other photo here).

The 'silly season' seems to have started early this year.
It's been remarkably quiet on the home news front-possibly due to the way easter has fallen earlier than usual.

I started my week off on a Guardian news story, however, which was the serbian man arrested when he visited Belgrade. He was living with his wife and two boys just up the road in Corby, Northamptonshire and is now being detained for alleged war crimes in Croatia during 1991.

I have no idea if the guy is innocent or guilty, but I do feel sorry for his wife. It's a very difficult situation for her with the two school-age boys to bring up and now no wage coming in. The Guardian's reporter spoke to her and I photographed her but then we backed off-she was shaking and obviously very distressed.
I think she was very brave just to come out of the house and speak-many people wouldn't have even ventured out of their front door under those circumstances.

Sadly, for various reasons, I can't talk about what I've been photographing this week.
So instead there's a link to the work of a photographer my friend Peter Payne alerted me to....here
Dave Hill's photos have a very stylized look to them and I've tried,(and mostly failed), to create a similar look on the pig photo on the right here. To me it looks too grainy and photoshoppy, but that may just be because I used a scanned film image rather than a digital one to practice on.
Sorry it's a pig photo again-not planned, it just worked out that way. I'm not obsessed with pigs, honestly.
This one is a rare breed Middle White which I photographed way back in 1994 at a farm near Preston. I've only just got around to scanning these negs in and it's a bit of a lucky dip as to what comes up as I go through my archives in order to digitise them and put them in my stock collection.

It's been one of those weeks where I've had a few spin offs from past jobs and also shot some stock photos along the way.
The little androgynous person on the tarmac was right by the boot of my car in a multi-storey car park. I'm afraid I ran them over, but not before I had taken a couple of quick snaps-I'll be interested to see if this one sells. It's amazing what does get sold on as stock images. Last week I made a sale from an image shot in 'smack alley' which showed dirty syringes,needles,and other drug taking paraphernalia in a messy heap of rubbish.

A banner for a rock band and pictures of the recent UK earthquake for a large insurance company were two of the other spin-offs from last week. Every little helps as they say at a certain store. I'm always on the lookout for more outlets to sell my work and also for stock photos. Sometimes it's very disappointing because you see a stock pic and there is no time to stop, not even to take a quick photo. That happened on Friday as I whizzed down a road alongside a field of daffodils in full bloom and lovely sunshine.

Amusing incident of the week-I was staying overnight at a hotel up north, along with a reporter from The Daily Telegraph.
We had tried and tried to get a hotel and everywhere was booked solid for some reason even though it was only a Tuesday night. So we ended up at a Fawlty Towers kind of place at 11.30 p.m. Unusually the rather strange owner said he would show us to our rooms and first he showed the reporter where 'number 40' was. Only it was number 41. As the reporter fumbled with the key in the gloom she was treated to the sight of a bloke fast asleep on the bed and stark bollock naked !!

Far be it from me to turn this blog into a whinge-but on this occasion I'm prepared to make an exception and let rip !
I realised last week that I have covered the Crufts dog show at Birmingham NEC for several consecutive years now.
It doesn't get any easier and this year was the worst of all-much more crowded and a lot more obstruction than usual from NEC security.

This year the parking arrangements were changed. Despite an early start I had to park a long walk away from the event and pay £8 for the privilege ! Next the usual waiting in line to get a form to fill in at the Press Centre and then a wait while they print out a pass. Finally, nearly an hour later, I get to do my job and actually take some photos.

Trouble is the pass the Press Centre have given me has the wrong coloured strip on it. So instead of getting to photograph the heelwork to music competitors in their collecting ring, together with the Sunday Telegraph's reporter, I am thrown out by security and we are told to go back to the Press Centre for purple striped passes. Problem-that is a twenty minute journey through heavy crowds,
by which time the heelwork to music will be over. Sadly, the security jobsworth is unimpressed by this argument and derives obvious pleasure from ejecting us.

So I take my seat at the allocated area for the press-it's a long way away from where I need to be to get decent photos and most of the 'reserved for photographers' seats are occupied by members of the public who just want to see the show, bless them.
It's a shame because there is one photographer taking shots from where I needed to be-plus lots of empty seats and a few members of the dognoscenti snapping away on their mobile phone cameras from the same position.

Back at the 'Press Centre' I ask one of the staff on their 'information desk' for some help. Unfortunately they are too busy sharing a private joke to help, so I end up answering my own question by looking on the Crufts website!

I guess all this proves that Crufts is big business now and The Kennel Club feel they no longer need to worry about publicity any more. Plus what I already knew about what happens when you put somebody with the IQ of an amoeba in a security uniform, of course!