It's a funny thing - 'inspiration'. Photographers talk about it all the time. I suppose being involved in the visual arts, we take 'inspiration' from all sorts of visual media. Photographs, movies, music videos, paintings etc. Or do we?

If I'm honest, movies don't really interest me in the way they do other photographers. I like to watch films that entertain me. I'm a sucker for post apocalyptic, sci-fi films. I watched 'Doomsday' last night starring Craig Conway as the blood thirsty leader of a tribe of cannibalistic punks. The film was 'Mad Max' meets 'Escape from New York'. To me it was highly entertaining, especially as I shot Craig's wedding a couple of years ago, and he's such a lovely person - so far removed from his character in this film!! I like to switch off and be entertained when watching films. 'Terminator - Salvation' will be high on my list of 'must see' films this summer, but I can't really see me utilising metal skeletons with red eyes on my next wedding ;-) So do I get influenced from movies? Not that I'm aware of.

Music videos. Now there's something I am genuinely interested in. Although my music taste tends to lean towards 'indie' music, and the thought of seeing Doves in concert in a couple of weeks has me really excited, as does the prospect of seeing the incredible Kasabian along with Oasis next week. However,  I'm not really sure how watching the video to 'Empire' really inspires me when taking wedding pictures - although I'm pretty sure it will be on my playlist in my car on the way to Saturday's wedding.

Art galleries and paintings. I think I enjoy looking at paintings, but I don't have any in my house apart from abstracts. I suppose painting is too formal for me. By it's nature it's a static medium, and this isn't really something that gets me too excited. I reckon if I were a portrait photographer, then paintings would be of real interest to me.

No - my inspiration has always come from photography. I feel photography, and in particular photojournalism and documentary photography, has a power that simply isn't there in other visual mediums. I must confess though, that I often ignore the content of the image and look at the composition and lighting. I bought the James Nachtwey book 'Inferno' a few years ago, and after showing it to my Dad, he was perplexed as to why I had such a book. The images are often disturbing, in some cases horrific, and yet I see a beauty in the lines and composition that run through Nachtwey's work. It's the same with Eugene Richard's 'Cocaine Blue'. Disturbing images, and yet I'm in awe of Richard's use of wide angle lenses. Alex Webb's 'Instanbul' is another favourite of mine. Webb's composition tends to utilise a componant in the image that splits the picture into two - maybe a wall, a pain of glass, a lampost. His images could be two pictures in one frame. Utterly brilliant.

When I look back at my images, I can see 'influences' from these photographers in my wedding work. They are certainly subconcious, as I never go out to take a 'Nachtwey' image on a wedding day. But they are there. I suppose it's years of being immersed in documentary photography. Even my landscape work has more in common with Don McCullin than any mainstream landscape photographer.

One of the things I get asked to do a lot, is look at other wedding photographer's work. But if I'm truly honest, looking at wedding photography doesn't really interest me. It never has done. The trouble with wedding photography is that it's driven by fad and fashion, and that isn't really me. I've only ever wanted to pursue my own style of photography - to develop a 'look' to my images that is mine. Over fifteen years I've been shooting with this mindset. I've been refining my style, and improving my images constantly and each year my goal is to change my images on my website with better images.

Even when it comes to post production and printing, my documentary influences still come to the fore. Early on in my career I was immersed in the work of Ansel Adams, and in particular his ideas on the Zone System. With digital I've been able to incorporate some of his Zone System ideas into my work, but more importantly I've taken on board his ideas on getting the very best out of black and white images. But perhaps a bigger influence was the look of the images from Sebastiao Salgado and W. Eugene Smith. Smith was a master in the darkroom, and his ideas on accentuating the main subject within an image still resonated with me today as I worked on Saturday's wedding pictures...which were inspired in some way by all of those great photographers.