“It started just a couple of years ago with a client commission for a series of cityscapes from a 30th floor balcony in London’s Barbican. The brief was to record the view at different times of day and in different weather conditions. I immediately thought that a panoramic technique of some sort was called for. The only trouble was: I hadn’t actually made any panoramas at that point...

As a long-term convert to digital I elected to try the stitching route. Sorting out the equipment (panoramic tripod head, stitching software etc) and, more especially, mastering their use, proved to be a steep learning curve. The trials were, in part, carried out on the South Downs and I suppose I worked the technology hard pretty much from the start as I quickly moved from stitching 4 and 5 images to stitching 40 or 50. Also, in order not to end up with long skinny images I elected to stack them vertically as well as horizontally.

In the end the Barbican project took a couple of months to complete but the resulting images, when they finally emerged, seemed to justify the investment… Okay, so I was really excited by them!

Firstly, the sheer number of component images involved meant that the final limited edition images were both large (well over a metre in length) and yet also minutely detailed. Just what the client was asking for - and the view itself demanded.

Better yet, the decidedly dizzying sensation of just being on the balcony was perfectly mirrored in the perspective curves that the 360 process generated.

With the commission completed I continued experimenting with the technique on the Downs. This rural work had an altogether different feel about it. Particularly striking was the way that, because of the all-round view, different sections of an image would have the light coming from different directions. So, whilst trees at one point might be silhouetted against the sun, those halfway across the final image would be in full sunlight. By the same token, a shadow coming directly towards the camera in one part may reappear going away from the camera in another. For me, rather than feeling “wrong”, these elements can, when sensitively handled, sometimes capture those rare occasions when you have time to stop and truly absorb the essence of a location.

Encouragingly, one of these images (made at the atmospheric Iron Age hill fort at Chanctonbury Ring) subsequently impressed Professional Photographer magazine sufficiently for them, and their sponsor Jessops, to name me winner of the Landscape section of their Professional Photographer of the Year awards.

Meanwhile, back in the City (this time at street level), I had adapted the technique again: By extending the location shoot to take a lot of extra, more spontaneous shots of people that happened past, I found that by subsequently selecting which figures to use and which to discard, I could effectively work compositionally on an image right through the entire post production process - not just camera in hand. By taking full advantage of the process in this way the final image is less “a moment captured in time” but is more of a construct of a whole series of moments. This has been a revelation as it is, in essence, a return to the kind of flexible working method that I previously used when painting.

To bring the story fully up-to-date: I have most recently extended the process again to purposefully include some figures more than once. This allows me to show them in a kind of sequence through time. This strand is on-going.

Finally then, on the downside, all this has pushed the technology still harder as 50-shot panoramas have escalated to 80 or even 100-shot panoramas and with files sizes in excess of 3 gigabytes I’m using up hard discs like they are going out of fashion! Also, because of the work involved in each of them, I’m now only producing two or three completed limited edition mages each month... Never-the-less, I feel the results make it worthwhile and both the strong sales (private and corporate) and commissions (including a new 8-panorama West End commission from Shaftesbury plc) suggest that I'm doing something right.

I hope you agree."