The Business of Being Human: Capturing the Moments Between the Handshakes

Business networking isn’t just about exchanging business cards, delivering presentations or making introductions. It’s about people.

The conversations, the laughter, the occasional nervous expression before someone stands up to speak, and those wonderful moments when people forget they’re being photographed.

As a commercial photographer covering Chester, Cheshire and North Wales, these are the moments I’m always looking for.

Photographing the Moments That Matter

I’ve been photographing BNI Chester meetings for some time, documenting the people and personalities that make up the group.

What interests me most isn’t necessarily the person standing at the front delivering a presentation. Quite often, it’s the people listening.

Someone laughing at a remark. A spontaneous reaction across the table. A conversation developing between two members. Someone completely absorbed in what another person is saying.

These moments tell us something about the people involved.

And they’re often far more interesting than a photograph of everyone looking towards the camera and smiling.

My Approach to Business Networking Photography

My photography has always been about observing people.

I prefer to work quietly, watching what’s happening around me and anticipating those little moments that can disappear in a fraction of a second.

I don’t want people constantly thinking about the camera. I want them concentrating on what they’re doing.

That’s when their personalities begin to emerge.

I also enjoy working in black and white. Removing colour can help concentrate attention on expressions, gestures, light and the relationships between people.

For me, business networking photography isn’t simply about recording who attended a meeting. It’s about capturing what it felt like to be there.

BNI Chester member laughing during a networking meeting award presentation, surrounded by fellow business professionals.

Showing the Human Side of Business

Businesses spend a great deal of time explaining what they do, but sometimes forget to show who they are.

Professional business photography can communicate something that words alone cannot.

A photograph of colleagues laughing together, an animated discussion during a meeting or someone speaking passionately about their business can reveal the character of an organisation.

For networking groups such as BNI Chester, these photographs can also help potential visitors understand what attending a meeting might actually feel like.

Rather than simply telling people that a group is welcoming, supportive or enjoyable, photographs can offer a glimpse of those qualities.

My job isn’t to manufacture an atmosphere that doesn’t exist. It’s to recognise and capture the one that’s already there.

Beyond Business Networking Meetings

Although these photographs were taken at BNI Chester, the same approach applies to corporate events, conferences, business meetings, training sessions and company gatherings.

Every business event has its own story.

There are the formal moments that need recording, but there are also the conversations, expressions and interactions happening around them.

I believe both are important.

Whether I’m photographing a business networking event in Chester, a corporate gathering in Cheshire or a company meeting in North Wales, my aim is the same.

To create natural, professional photographs that show the people, personalities and atmosphere behind a business.

The Moments Between the Handshakes

One of the things I enjoy most about photographing people is that you never quite know what you’re going to see.

Sometimes the most interesting photograph happens when nothing particularly important appears to be happening.

Someone smiles. Two people exchange a glance. A room erupts in laughter.

And for a fraction of a second, there’s a photograph.

That’s the business of being human.

I’m Ray Jones, a commercial photographer specialising in business portraits and natural business photography across Chester, Cheshire, Wrexham and North Wales.

If you’re looking for professional photography that captures the people and personalities behind your business, I’d love to hear from you.

You can also explore my Business Portrait Photography to see how I capture the people behind behind businesses.

Autumn Photography in Llanrwst, North Wales

Sometimes the best photographs are the ones you weren’t planning to take.

I’d finished a photography job and was travelling home through North Wales when I decided to stop in Llanrwst for a cup of tea. I wasn’t looking for another photograph. The working day was finished and the camera could quite easily have stayed packed away.

Then I saw this.

Autumn colours in Llanrwst

The first thing that caught my attention was the incredible Virginia creeper covering the building. At this time of year it had turned a beautiful deep red, standing out against the greens, yellows and browns of the surrounding trees.

Add the stone bridge, dark water and slightly dramatic Welsh sky and I knew I had to get the camera back out.

This is one of the things I love about autumn photography in North Wales. The landscape can change enormously within a few weeks. Places you might have driven past throughout the summer suddenly look completely different when the autumn colours arrive.

Photography without a brief

Most of my working week is spent photographing people and businesses. As a professional photographer, there is normally a purpose behind every photograph I create. There’s a client, a brief and a particular result we’re trying to achieve.

Photography like this is different.

There was no client. No brief. No shot list. Nobody waiting for the finished image.

I simply saw something that caught my eye and wanted to photograph it.

I think it’s important for professional photographers to occasionally do that. It takes you back to one of the reasons many of us picked up a camera in the first place: because we noticed something and wanted to capture it.

Photographing North Wales

I’m incredibly fortunate to work as a photographer across North Wales, Cheshire, Chester and the surrounding areas, and travelling to photography jobs means I regularly find myself passing through some beautiful places.

Llanrwst is certainly one of them.

It would have been very easy to have my cup of tea, get back in the car and continue home. Instead, I stopped for a few minutes longer and made this photograph.

Sometimes the photograph you weren’t planning to take is the one you’re most pleased you stopped for.

Ray Jones
Professional Photographer covering North Wales, Cheshire and Chester

Another Piece of My Public Speaking Jigsaw

I’m not ready to stop documenting my public speaking journey yet. I don’t know when I will be, because I still feel as though I’m right in the middle of it.

Public speaking has been fucking painful for me at times. I’ve watched other people get up and speak seemingly without giving it much thought, while I’ve had to work at almost every part of it. Confidence, nerves, stumbling over words, worrying about what people think, wondering where to look, wondering what to do with my hands and analysing everything afterwards.

Progress hasn’t arrived as one great moment when everything suddenly clicked. It has been more like putting together a massive jigsaw, monumentally slowly. Every so often I find another piece and suddenly understand something that I couldn’t understand before.

I think I’ve just found one of the biggest pieces so far.

For my last two pitches, I did something differently. Instead of standing there and speaking towards a room full of people, I actually looked at individual people as I spoke. I looked at one person, then somebody else, then another person across the room.

And I talked.

I really talked.

The words seemed to come much more freely than they normally do. I wasn’t desperately thinking about what I should say next or worrying about how I was coming across. I was communicating with the people in front of me.

Then I realised what had changed.

Before, when I stood in front of a room and looked at nobody in particular, I was completely focused inwards. Even though there were people sitting in front of me, a huge part of my attention was actually on myself.

How am I sounding? Am I stumbling? Am I speaking properly? What are they thinking about me?

By looking directly at individual people, I gave my attention somewhere else to go. Instead of concentrating on myself, I became interested in them. Were they listening? Were they understanding what I was saying? Was I actually communicating with them?

For those moments, I forgot about myself.

That feels monumental to me.

The strange thing is that people have probably told me about eye contact countless times. Every public speaking guide tells you to make eye contact. I knew that already. But knowing something and actually experiencing why it works are completely different things.

I had to discover it while standing there speaking.

That seems to be how I’m learning all of this. I can read about public speaking, listen to advice and watch other speakers, but some things only seem to make sense when I experience them for myself. I have to stand up, feel uncomfortable, try something, get something wrong, try again and occasionally discover another piece of the jigsaw.

Perhaps that’s why some of these discoveries feel so enormous to me. Somebody else might think, “Well, of course you should look at your audience.” For me, it isn’t simply about eye contact. I’ve discovered a way of moving my attention away from myself.

I’m not standing there watching myself speak anymore.

I’m looking at somebody and talking to them.

I don’t think I’ve cracked public speaking. Far from it. I’ll probably have another speech where I stumble, lose my place or become horribly self-conscious again. I’m also trying not to turn this discovery into another thing I have to get perfectly right.

There are still lots of pieces missing.

That’s why I’m going to carry on documenting this journey. I want to remember the difficult bits as much as the breakthroughs, because this isn’t a story about somebody who woke up one morning and suddenly became a confident public speaker.

It’s about somebody who keeps getting up there and, monumentally slowly, is finding the pieces for himself.

Ray

Something happened yesterday that made me think.

I’ve been reaching out to hospitality businesses recently, introducing myself and my photography. As you’d expect with outreach, some reply, some don’t and some simply say no.

But yesterday I received several replies I wasn’t expecting. They were selling their businesses.

One probably wouldn’t have particularly registered, but seeing several of them sitting in my inbox at the same time stopped me for a moment.

When we visit a restaurant, hotel, café or pub, we see what’s in front of us. The tables are laid, the lights are on, the food arrives and everything carries on as normal. We rarely know what’s happening behind the scenes.

I don’t know why these particular owners are selling, and I wouldn’t want to assume. But each of those emails represented somebody who had once decided to open a business, put their name above the door and give it a go.

I started the day looking for photography work. Instead, those emails made me think about just how much of somebody’s life can sit behind the words “business for sale”.

Ray

Something happened yesterday that made me think.

I’ve been reaching out to hospitality businesses recently, introducing myself and my photography. As you’d expect with outreach, some reply, some don’t and some simply say no.

But yesterday I received several replies I wasn’t expecting. They were selling their businesses.

One probably wouldn’t have particularly registered, but seeing several of them sitting in my inbox at the same time stopped me for a moment.

When we visit a restaurant, hotel, café or pub, we see what’s in front of us. The tables are laid, the lights are on, the food arrives and everything carries on as normal. We rarely know what’s happening behind the scenes.

I don’t know why these particular owners are selling, and I wouldn’t want to assume. But each of those emails represented somebody who had once decided to open a business, put their name above the door and give it a go.

I started the day looking for photography work. Instead, those emails made me think about just how much of somebody’s life can sit behind the words “business for sale”.

Ray

When I pick up my camera, the rest of the room disappears.

When a chef stands beside me while I photograph their food, I feel more connected to what I’m doing and disconnected from the world around me.

My attention settles on the dish. The textures, the colours, where the light falls. Having the person who created it beside me makes it feel more personal. They’ve made their choices on the plate; now I’m making mine with the camera.

I become so absorbed that everything beyond that little space seems to fade into the background. It’s one of the things I love about photographing food.

What do you get so absorbed in that you forget the world around you?

Ray

Social Media Doesn’t Show the Whole Picture

I’ve noticed something about social media recently. You can follow a business for months and, from the outside, everything appears to be going brilliantly. They’re posting regularly, sharing new work and showing photographs of meetings, events and happy customers. Then one day you hear that the business has closed and think, “I didn’t see that coming.” But why would you?

It made me think about my own job as a photographer. When I photograph someone, I might take hundreds of photographs, but I certainly don’t show them every single one. There will be photographs where they blinked, their expression wasn’t quite right, I caught them between poses or perhaps there’s absolutely nothing technically wrong with the photograph but another one is simply better.

Those photographs don’t make the final selection. I choose the strongest images, edit them and deliver the photographs that represent my best work. That isn’t being dishonest. It’s simply part of being a photographer, and when you think about it, businesses are doing something very similar on social media.

We’re seeing the selects

Most businesses aren’t going to announce every difficult week. They probably won’t tell us when enquiries have dried up, when a quote has been rejected or when they’re worried about where next month’s work is coming from. Instead, they’ll talk about the customer they did win, the event they attended, the project they completed or the positive feedback they received.

There’s nothing particularly wrong with that. Social media is part of their marketing, so naturally they’re going to present their business in the best possible light. The problem comes when the rest of us forget that we’re only seeing a selection.

Comparing your contact sheet with somebody else’s final edit

Running my own business means I see everything that happens in it. I know when my diary has gaps, when an enquiry doesn’t turn into a booking and when I send a quote that doesn’t get accepted. I know what money is coming in, what’s going out and when things are quieter than I’d like them to be.

Then I can open LinkedIn or Instagram and see somebody else apparently doing brilliantly. They’ve landed another client, completed another big project or attended another fantastic meeting. It’s incredibly easy to look at that and wonder what you’re doing wrong.

But there’s a flaw in that comparison. I’m comparing everything I know about my own business with a carefully selected glimpse of somebody else’s. In photography terms, I’m comparing my entire contact sheet with their finished portfolio.

That doesn’t mean social media is fake

I don’t think businesses should suddenly start publishing every problem they encounter in the name of being authentic. There are plenty of things that quite rightly remain private, and marketing has always involved deciding what you want potential customers to see.

A restaurant uses photographs of its best dishes. A hotel shows its most attractive rooms. I put my strongest portraits on my website rather than every photograph I’ve ever taken. None of that is dishonest. There is a big difference between selecting the strongest parts of reality and inventing a reality that doesn’t exist.

Perhaps, then, the lesson isn’t that we should distrust everything we see on social media. It’s that we shouldn’t use somebody else’s social media presence as a reliable measure of how well their business is doing, particularly when comparing it with our own.

Behind every polished business page is a much bigger contact sheet that we’ll probably never see. It contains successes and failures, busy periods and quiet ones, good decisions and bad ones. That’s simply what running a business looks like.

And perhaps that’s worth remembering the next time somebody else’s business appears to be doing perfectly online. We’re looking at their selects, not their entire shoot.

Ray

My Public Speaking Journey

The Night I Discovered My Funny Side

I’ve always wanted to try comedy.

The problem is, I’ve also spent a large part of my life being terrified of standing up in front of people.

Those two things don’t exactly go well together.

But recently, something changed.

At Chester Toastmasters we tried a different version of Table Topics. Instead of simply being given a question and speaking for a couple of minutes, we were thrown into a scene and had to improvise.

No script. No preparation. No time to overthink it.

I stepped forward, adopted a completely different persona and just ran with it.

And the room started laughing.

Not polite laughter either. Proper laughter.

For about a minute, I stopped worrying about how I sounded, whether I was saying the right thing or what everybody thought of me.

I was just having fun.

The photograph from that evening has become one of my favourite photographs from my public speaking journey. You can’t even see my face. I’m standing with my back to the camera while the people in front of me are laughing.

And perhaps that’s why I like it so much.

For years, the thought of having an entire room looking at me would have terrified me.

Now I have a photograph of exactly that happening, and I’m making them laugh.

Confidence is changing me

Something interesting is happening as I continue pushing myself with public speaking.

I’m not becoming a different person.

I’m becoming more comfortable showing the parts of myself that were already there.

The humour. The silliness. The characters. The slightly outrageous comments that previously might have remained safely inside my head.

I’ve always been a fan of Julian Clary and love his wonderfully dry, outrageous style of comedy. There’s something about delivering an outrageous line as though you’ve just commented on the weather that makes me laugh.

I’m beginning to realise that confidence isn’t necessarily about becoming louder or more polished.

Sometimes it’s simply about giving yourself permission to play.

One minute matters

I’m certainly not pretending that one funny Table Topic suddenly makes me a comedian.

But it does prove something to me.

I stepped forward without knowing what I was going to say. I trusted myself. I took a risk.

People laughed.

And most importantly, I loved doing it.

Not so long ago, I was concentrating on simply becoming more comfortable speaking in front of people.

Now I’m wondering where I could take it next.

Perhaps one day I’ll actually stand on a stage and perform a few minutes of comedy.

That thought still scares me.

Which is probably a very good reason to do it.

I’m not booking the London Palladium just yet.

But I’ve cracked the ice.

Watch this space. 😏

Ray

Why Consistency Matters When Photographing Your Team

Put a collection of staff headshots together and something becomes immediately obvious.

They need to look like they belong together.

The people will naturally be different. Different heights, different face shapes, different hairstyles, glasses, clothing and skin tones. My job isn’t to make the people look the same. It’s to create a consistent photographic style around them while still allowing each person to look like themselves.

That’s where controlled lighting becomes important.

Taking the studio to the client

For corporate headshots, I use studio flash on location. I’m effectively taking a small photography studio into the workplace rather than relying on whatever light happens to be available when I arrive.

Natural light can be beautiful, but it changes. Clouds move, sunlight comes through windows, the weather changes and the light at the beginning of a session can be very different from the light later in the day.

Studio flash gives me control.

Once I’ve established the position, direction and power of my lights, along with my camera settings, I can reproduce that look throughout the session.

The collage below demonstrates exactly why that matters.

Consistency doesn’t mean identical

Look across these portraits and there’s a common style running through them, but every person is still an individual.

That distinction matters to me.

Corporate photography can sometimes become a production line, particularly when a large number of people need to be photographed in a limited amount of time. But the person standing in front of my camera shouldn’t feel like they’re simply the next person in the queue.

Some people immediately relax in front of a camera. Others would rather be anywhere else.

So while my lighting and technical setup remain consistent, the way I work with the person has to change. I’ll talk to them, give simple direction and make small adjustments to their position until we get something that feels natural.

The technical side should be repeatable. The human side shouldn’t be.

Why does this matter to a business?

A single headshot might be used on LinkedIn, an email signature or a company profile.

But put an entire team together on a website and inconsistencies become much more noticeable.

Different lighting, backgrounds, crops and photographic styles can make a team page look as though the photographs have been collected from different places over several years.

Consistent headshots create a much stronger visual identity.

And there’s another advantage to creating a repeatable lighting setup. When somebody new joins the company, I can photograph them in the same style so their portrait fits naturally alongside the existing team.

Good headshots are about more than the camera

There’s a lot happening behind what looks like a relatively simple photograph.

Lighting, exposure, positioning, background, composition and expression all have to work together. When you’re photographing a whole team, you also need a workflow that allows you to repeat those things reliably without losing the individuality of the person standing in front of you.

That’s what I enjoy about this kind of work.

Control the light. Keep the photography consistent. Let the people be themselves.

If your business needs consistent professional headshots for a team, you can see my business portrait and team headshot photography here.

Ray

I’ve noticed something slightly annoying about social media.

The videos you spend ages planning, lighting, recording and editing don’t always get the most attention.

Then you point your phone at yourself, say something off the cuff, barely edit it and THAT’S the one people engage with.

Lazy content often wins.

Although I’m beginning to think “lazy” is probably the wrong word. It’s low production, not necessarily low effort.

People don’t always want polished. They want something that feels immediate, human and real.

As a photographer, my instinct is naturally to think about the light, composition, background and how everything looks. But sometimes all that polish can actually put distance between you and the person watching.

So I’m learning to separate the two.

My photography should look professional. My videos don’t always need to.

Sometimes a phone, an interesting thought and the confidence to press record is enough.

And perhaps the biggest challenge is knowing when to stop fiddling with it and just post it.

Ray

Kayley and John Stubbs’ Wedding at The Chester Grosvenor

Some wedding photographs become more significant with time.

On 30 August, I photographed the wedding of Kayley and John Stubbs at The Chester Grosvenor.

For Kayley, getting married at The Chester Grosvenor had been a dream. She wanted her wedding at one of Chester’s most iconic hotels, and she got her wish.

Just over a month later, at the end of September, the hotel will close its doors.

That makes photographing one of its final weddings feel particularly special.

A dream wedding in the heart of Chester

The Chester Grosvenor has been part of the city for generations. It’s one of those buildings you immediately associate with Chester, and over the years countless couples have walked through its doors to celebrate their weddings.

Kayley and John will now be among the last couples to do so before the hotel closes.

But on their wedding day, none of that was the story.

The story was simply about the two of them.

The excitement, the nerves, family and friends arriving, the celebrations and all those little unscripted moments that make every wedding completely different.

One of my favourite moments

This photograph of Kayley arriving is one of my favourites from the day.

There’s a lot happening. People are helping with her dress, the car door is still open and Chester carries on around her.

And right in the middle of it all is Kayley.

Smiling, bouquet in hand, with her veil caught beautifully in the air.

I could have tried to control every element of the photograph, but I think that would have taken something away from it. I much prefer the fact that it feels like what it was: a real moment from her wedding day.

Photographs become history

Knowing that The Chester Grosvenor will close at the end of September gives Kayley and John’s wedding photographs another layer of significance.

First and foremost, they are photographs of two people getting married.

But over time, photographs often become something else too.

They record places, buildings, fashions, people and moments that eventually change or disappear.

Kayley dreamed of getting married at The Chester Grosvenor.

She did.

And I had the privilege of being there to photograph it during the final weeks of an extraordinary chapter in this historic Chester hotel’s story.

Sometimes we think we’re simply photographing a wedding.

Then, years later, we realise we were photographing a little piece of history too.

Ray

Mobile phone journalism

The camera was an iPhone. The result was BBC Breakfast.

I have just watched a TikTok about two BBC reporters who were sent to Rome for twelve hours.

They recorded the entire assignment using iPhones and small microphones. The footage was then edited into a report and broadcast on BBC Breakfast.

Think about that for a moment.

Footage recorded on a device millions of people carry in their pockets was considered good enough for one of the BBC’s flagship television programmes.

I’m a photographer, but I’m also a creative!

My interest in video did not begin with social media. I was recording video in the 1990s and remember editing it using Pinnacle. It was a much slower process than opening an app on a phone, but I loved taking separate pieces of footage and turning them into a finished story.

These days, I record my own promotional videos and show other people how to film themselves. The technology has changed enormously, but the creative thinking behind it has not.

You still need to recognise the story.

You still need to understand light, composition and sound.

You still need to know what to include, what to leave out and what you want the audience to feel.

As a professional photographer, I could easily feel threatened by the growing quality of mobile phone cameras. I have invested in professional cameras, lenses, lighting and years of experience.

But excellent phone footage does not make professional equipment or professional people redundant.

It reveals where the real value has always been.

The iPhones captured the pictures, but they did not decide what the story was.

They did not choose who to interview, recognise the important moments, compose the shots, listen for revealing answers or decide how the final piece should be structured.

The reporters did that.

The phone was the tool. Their judgement created the report.

That distinction matters because people often draw the wrong conclusion from examples like this.

They either say that expensive equipment is no longer necessary, or they dismiss phone footage as amateur.

Neither argument tells the whole story.

Professional cameras still offer greater control, better lenses, stronger performance in difficult conditions and much more flexibility. I would not abandon my Canon cameras and photograph every commercial assignment on my phone.

But an iPhone is now capable of producing remarkably good video when it is placed in the hands of someone who understands light, sound, composition, interviewing and storytelling.

The BBC example also underlines something many people overlook.

They used microphones.

People will often tolerate pictures that are not absolutely perfect, but poor sound can make even attractive footage difficult to watch. A simple microphone, thoughtful positioning and awareness of the surroundings can transform the result.

This is why I believe businesses need to stop thinking that video begins with buying more equipment.

Most business owners already own a camera capable of producing content that could represent them professionally.

What they often lack is the confidence to appear on camera, the ability to recognise a worthwhile story and the practical knowledge needed to record and edit it properly.

Buying another camera will not solve those problems.

An iPhone makes filming accessible. It does not make storytelling automatic.

A small business does not necessarily need a large production crew every time it wants to introduce a member of staff, explain a service, show how something is made or share a customer story.

Sometimes it needs an iPhone, a decent microphone, good light and somebody who knows what they are trying to communicate.

That is why I enjoy showing people how to film themselves.

It is not simply about teaching them where to position the phone or which button to press. It is about helping them become more comfortable on camera, recognise the stories inside their businesses and communicate those stories clearly.

I use professional cameras when an assignment requires them, but I also use my iPhone to create my own promotional videos and record business stories.

That is not lowering the standard.

It is choosing the appropriate tool for the job.

The standard should be judged by the finished result, not by the size of the camera used to create it.

Seeing iPhone footage broadcast on BBC Breakfast reinforces something I have believed for a long time.

Equipment matters, but it is rarely the thing holding people back.

The real barriers are confidence, clarity and skill.

If the BBC can send reporters to Rome with iPhones and microphones, a business can certainly begin telling better stories with the technology it already owns.

The question is no longer whether your phone is good enough.

The question is whether you know how to use it well enough.

Ray

#MobileJournalism #VideoContent #BusinessStorytelling #iPhoneVideo #ContentCreation

Who Would Have Known About My Life?

There was a time when being noticed was one of the last things I wanted. When I look at where I am now, it’s difficult to reconcile that with the person I became because of what happened at school.

I was outed before I’d even had the chance to understand what I was myself. Other people put a label on me first, and the bullying that followed made my secondary school years something I learnt to endure rather than enjoy.

Eventually, hiding became my way of coping. I withdrew from society and became something of a hermit, living with enormous anxiety and trying my best not to attract attention. Other people appeared to be getting on with life while I was concentrating on making myself as invisible as possible.

Then I did something with those memories that probably helped me carry on at the time. I buried them. For around 30 years, I tried not to think about what had happened at school. I thought I’d left it behind. Only recently have I realised that pushing something away for decades doesn’t necessarily mean you’ve dealt with it.

I’ve started revisiting those years, and with the memories have come feelings that I haven’t always found easy to accept. Sometimes I’m angry about what happened. Then I can find myself feeling guilty for being angry, as though I’m supposed to have reached an age where none of it should matter anymore.

I’m beginning to accept that both things can exist together. I can recognise how much those experiences affected me while refusing to let anger determine the rest of my life.

The feeling I struggle with most is the thought of what I might have missed. I wonder sometimes what choices I would have made without all that anxiety. Would I have met different people? Taken more opportunities? Lived differently if my first instinct hadn’t so often been to retreat? There are no answers to those questions, and there never will be.

What matters to me now is what is beginning to happen at the other end of that story.

I’m at last finding success in business. I’m putting myself into situations that the younger version of me would probably have done almost anything to avoid. Instead of trying not to be noticed, I’m learning how to be visible.

One of the ways I’ve been doing that is by standing in front of a camera and filming myself. It was uncomfortable because it went against years of instinct. But the more I’ve done it, the more I’ve understood that confidence wasn’t something I needed to find before pressing record. It developed through repeatedly pressing record.

I’ve learnt to stop demanding perfection from myself. I can forget a word. I can pause. I can stumble and carry on. I don’t need to turn into a performer just because there’s a camera pointing at me. I can simply be myself.

Perhaps the most unexpected part of all this is that I’m now beginning to help other people do the same thing.

I’m showing people who lack confidence on camera how to film themselves and become more comfortable being seen. I’m encouraging them not to hide behind perfection or believe they need to become somebody else when the camera starts recording. In many ways, I’m teaching them the same process I’ve been going through myself.

There’s something significant about that. I spent years trying to disappear, and now I’m deliberately putting myself in front of a camera and helping other people find the confidence to do it too.

I’m also speaking more, meeting people, developing my business and deliberately walking towards situations I once would have avoided. That old instinct to hide hasn’t simply vanished, but I’m challenging it rather than automatically obeying it.

I don’t want to rewrite my past and pretend those school years didn’t have consequences. They did. Nor can I go back and give my younger self the adolescence he might have had without the bullying. I’ll never know what a different version of my life would have looked like.

But those people don’t get to own the rest of the story.

Perhaps dealing with my past isn’t about forgetting it, pretending it didn’t matter or even forgiving the people responsible. Perhaps it’s about finally acknowledging what happened, understanding how it shaped me and choosing not to spend the years ahead hiding because of it.

They took enough from me.

They don’t get what comes next.

Ray

Introducing My Fine Art Dog & Horse Portraits

I’ve always believed that the photographs we choose to put on our walls should mean something to us.

For me, this one certainly does.

Meet Alfie.

Introducing My Fine Art Dog & Horse Portraits

I’ve always believed that the photographs we choose to put on our walls should mean something to us.

For me, this one certainly does.

Meet Alfie.

I’ve photographed him countless times over the years, but I wanted something different. I wanted a portrait of him that didn’t simply look like a photograph of my dog. I wanted something that felt timeless, with depth and character, and ultimately something I would be proud to have hanging in my home.

That became the starting point for my new Fine Art Animal Portraits, created for dogs and horses.

It starts with character

Every animal has a character of their own.

Some dogs are calm and dignified. Others won’t sit still for more than three seconds. Some are inquisitive, some serious and others seem determined to make the entire session as difficult as possible.

Horses are no different.

Their character can be found in the smallest things. The position of an ear, the turn of the head, the expression in an eye or simply the way they hold themselves.

I don’t want to photograph that character out of them.

The aim is to create a portrait that still feels unmistakably like your dog or horse, but presented in a much more considered, artistic way.

Alfie was my first.

I photographed him against a simple black background before carefully working on the portrait afterwards, building the dark tones, texture and painterly quality you see in the finished image.

I’ve now taken that same approach into my horse portraits.

The simplicity is deliberate. There are no elaborate sets or distracting props.

Just the animal.

Created for the wall, not the phone

This is quite different from the way many photography sessions are sold.

I won’t be offering collections of full resolution digital files.

Each commission is created with one purpose: to produce a finished piece of fine art for your home.

There will be just three sizes.

One carefully selected mount.

One signature frame.

Each portrait will be professionally fine art printed, mounted, framed and supplied ready to hang.

A low resolution digital copy of your chosen portrait will also be included so you can share it online, but printable high resolution files won’t be supplied.

I want the finished artwork to remain exactly as I intended it to be seen.

Why dogs and horses?

Because the animals that become part of our lives deserve more than thousands of photographs sitting on our phones.

With dogs, that relationship might span years of walks, routines and companionship.

With horses, the relationship can be just as personal. Owners know every expression, every habit and every tiny detail that makes their horse theirs.

That is what I want these portraits to preserve.

Not simply what they looked like.

Who they were.

One portrait.

Beautifully printed.

Beautifully framed.

And hanging somewhere you’ll see it every day.

Fine Art Dog & Horse Portraits by Raymond Jones Images.

More details will be coming soon.

My Public Speaking Journey: When the Nerves Start to Get Out of the Way

Another presentation done and dusted, and what a difference. I’ve been deliberately pushing myself with public speaking because I’ve learnt that confidence doesn’t suddenly arrive before you do something. For me, it has been developing by repeatedly putting myself in situations where I have to stand up, speak and trust myself.

One of the things I wanted to work on this time was pausing. When nerves take over, there’s a temptation to fill every second with words, speak faster and almost race towards the finish. This time I consciously slowed things down and gave people time to take in what I was saying. More importantly, I gave myself time to think about what I wanted to say next. I had notes with me, but they stayed safely tucked away in my pocket throughout the entire presentation. Knowing they were there was enough.

Something else has started happening as my nerves have reduced: my humour is coming through. I love getting people to laugh, and I’m beginning to realise just how much my nerves used to suppress that side of me. When I was nervous, so much of my attention was devoted to remembering what I wanted to say and worrying about how I was coming across that there wasn’t much room left for spontaneity. Now I’m relaxed enough to react to the room, make observations and let my personality become part of the presentation.

For my previous presentation, I demonstrated how I photograph people. This time I decided to take everyone into another part of my work: food photography. Rather than simply showing a collection of finished photographs, I wanted people to see how those photographs are actually created.

I photographed a chocolate cake live, talking through my thought process, lighting choices and camera angles as I worked. My camera was tethered to my laptop, which was connected to the large screen in the room, so everyone could watch the photographs appearing as I took them. They could see what happened when I changed something and, more importantly, understand why I was changing it.

That’s one of the things I enjoy most about demonstrating photography. The finished image doesn’t simply happen because you own an expensive camera. It comes from a series of decisions about light, angle, composition, exposure and what you want the viewer to notice. Being able to make those decisions while explaining them to a room full of people was also a great test of my own knowledge. When you’ve been doing something for years, explaining why you do it makes you think about your own process differently.

I also received some valuable feedback from my team afterwards, which I’ll take into my next presentation. Becoming a better speaker isn’t about finishing a presentation and deciding I’ve cracked it. There will always be something I can improve, and every time I stand up in front of a room I learn something new.

Perhaps the biggest change is that public speaking is gradually becoming less about controlling my nerves and more about communicating with the people in front of me. I’m pausing more, thinking more clearly, making people laugh and, perhaps most importantly, I’m actually starting to enjoy myself. The nerves haven’t completely disappeared, but they’re taking up far less space, which is allowing more of my personality to come through.

A huge thank you to Red Rose Cake Company for supplying the mouthwatering chocolate cake for the demonstration. You can find them at www.redrosecakeco.com. And thank you to everyone who watched, laughed and gave me feedback afterwards.

Another presentation completed, another lesson learnt, and another step forward in my public speaking journey. Here’s to the next one.

Ray

Before It Reaches the Plate

There’s something rather satisfying about photographing food before it becomes food.

These grapes are growing on our vines at home. I’ve watched them develop amongst the leaves, gradually getting larger, and naturally I eventually reached for my camera.

Most of my professional food photography begins much later in the story. A chef has chosen the ingredients, prepared the dish, plated it beautifully and then it’s my job to photograph it in a way that makes someone want to eat it.

But food has a story long before it reaches the plate.

It starts with ingredients growing in gardens, fields, orchards and vineyards. The shape of a leaf, the way sunlight falls through it and even the imperfections are all part of that story.

Photographing what’s already there

I didn’t want to interfere too much with these grapes.

There was no styling, artificial background or carefully arranged composition. I simply moved around the vine looking at how the natural light was falling and searching for a viewpoint where the grapes stood out from everything surrounding them.

The shallow depth of field helped separate the bunch from the foliage while still leaving enough of the environment visible to show exactly where they were growing.

That’s an important distinction.

Crop too tightly and it becomes a photograph of some grapes. Leave a little of the vine and foliage around them and suddenly there’s context.

Food photography is storytelling

This is something I think about when photographing professionally too.

A good food photograph doesn’t necessarily need to show everything. It needs to make you notice something.

Sometimes that’s the texture of freshly baked bread, the shine of a sauce, steam rising from a dish or the detail of an ingredient.

And sometimes it’s simply a bunch of grapes quietly growing amongst the leaves.

They’re not ready for the plate yet.

For now, I’m quite happy just photographing them. 🍇

Ray

Camera Confidence: Why I Use Video for More Than Marketing

I had the most wonderful 121 recently with a client I’ll soon be photographing. During our conversation, we talked about something I hear all the time: she’s nervous in front of the camera, both having her photograph taken and filming herself.

It made me realise that what I’ll actually be helping her with isn’t simply photography or video. It’s camera confidence.

As a portrait photographer, I regularly work with people who tell me they hate having their photograph taken. The technical side matters, but so does helping someone relax enough that I can photograph the person rather than the nerves.

Video presents a different challenge. You have to press record, look into a lens and talk, often with nobody there to guide you. It can feel incredibly unnatural.

I know because I didn’t start making videos because I was confident. I started making them because I wanted to become more confident.

At first, video was simply another way of promoting my photography business. But the more I did it, the more comfortable I became with hearing my own voice, making mistakes and expressing myself without trying to make everything perfect.

That confidence started carrying over into other areas of my life. Networking became easier. Talking about my business became easier. Public speaking became easier.

That’s what I want to help my client discover.

I’ll teach her how to film herself, think about lighting and sound, speak naturally to the camera and edit her own videos. But the real goal isn’t learning which buttons to press.

It’s becoming comfortable enough to press record in the first place.

Because sometimes learning to make videos isn’t really about video at all.

It’s about finding your voice.

Ray

This photograph is real. I know because I was there and took it!

Well, obviously I was there. I’m in it.

But there’s a serious point behind that.

The most deceptive AI images I see aren’t always posted by people pretending to be photographers. Sometimes they’re posted by photographers.

And that bothers me.

I’m not against AI. I experiment with it and I’m fascinated by what it can do.

What I have a problem with is AI generated imagery being posted without explanation, allowing people to believe it was photographed by them.

Photography has always involved editing. I edit my RAW files. I adjust exposure, colour and contrast. I might remove a distraction.

But the fundamental moment happened.

The person was there. The location was there. The light was there. Someone pressed the shutter.

AI changes that relationship.

If AI creates a person, replaces a location or generates something that never existed in front of a camera, I think we should say so.

Especially if we call ourselves photographers.

If you generated it, say you generated it.

If you photographed it, say you photographed it.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with creating AI imagery.

But allowing people to believe you photographed something you didn’t is something entirely different.

As AI becomes harder to spot, transparency matters more than ever.

Ray

From Portraits to Cake: My Next Live Photography Demonstration

For my last ten minute business presentation, I decided not to stand at the front of the room and simply talk about photography. I demonstrated it.

I photographed a portrait live, showing how a carefully placed light could take an ordinary picture and turn it into a professional business portrait. This Thursday morning, I am doing something different. I will be putting a cake on the table and demonstrating how I photograph food.

The aim is to build the image in front of the audience. I will show them what the cake looks like before I introduce my lighting, how the direction of that light reveals its shape and texture, and how a few considered changes can completely alter the finished photograph.

There will be no hiding behind a polished final image or a lengthy slideshow. Everyone in the room will be able to see the process as it happens.

Why photograph a cake live?

Food photography can look deceptively simple. Put an attractive cake on a table, point a good camera at it and surely the job is done.

It is not.

A beautifully made cake can still look flat, dull or unappetising if the light is wrong. The angle of the light affects the texture of the sponge, the sheen of the chocolate and the shape of every decoration. The position of the camera changes which details command attention. Even the choice of background can make the difference between a quick record shot and an image that makes somebody want to reach for a fork.

The chocolate cake pictured here is a good example of the style I enjoy creating. The light catches the surface and chocolate shards while the shadows add depth and atmosphere. It is not about making the food look false. It is about drawing attention to the details that make it worth eating.

Could a local cake maker help?

I am now looking for a local cake maker who would like to collaborate with me on Thursday morning near Chester.

I need one striking cake that will look good on the demonstration table. It does not have to be enormous or overly elaborate, but texture, layers or interesting decoration would give me plenty to work with under the lights.

In return, I will credit the cake maker and their business during my presentation to a room full of local businesspeople. I will also provide the finished photographs for them to use afterwards.

If you are a cake maker who would like to be involved, or you know someone whose work deserves to be photographed, please get in touch or send them this post.

If the worst comes to the worst, I will buy a mountain of fairy cakes, pile them onto an old vintage cake stand and make them look magnificent. That could be a useful demonstration in itself, but I would love to use the opportunity to showcase the work of a talented local cake maker.

Ray

Straight From the Garden

There is something deeply satisfying about seeing a table covered with food that was growing in the garden only a short time earlier.

This harvest of onions, courgettes and green beans has not been polished or arranged to look unnaturally perfect. The soil, papery onion skins, twisting stalks and different shapes are all part of its character. It is food as it really is, before it is trimmed, chopped, cooked and carefully presented on a plate.

We often encounter food at the final stage. A finished dish arrives at the table and we admire the colours, the presentation and, hopefully, the flavour. Yet every plate begins somewhere else. It begins with the ground, the weather and the patience of the person growing the ingredients.

Home grown produce also reminds us that uniformity is not the same as quality. A courgette may be larger than expected. One onion might grow slightly crooked, while another remains small. None of this matters when the ingredients are fresh, full of flavour and destined for the kitchen.

That is what attracted me to this scene as a photographer. It was not styled food photography in the traditional sense. There were no tweezers, carefully placed garnishes or elaborate lighting decisions. The story was already there in the abundance of the harvest, the warm colour of the onions and the contrast of the fresh greens.

Photographing food is about much more than making a finished dish look appetising. It is also about provenance, people and process. The ingredients themselves can tell us where a meal began and give us a stronger connection to what we eat.

Soon, these vegetables will be prepared and become part of something delicious. For this moment, though, they deserve to be seen just as they came from the garden: honest, imperfect and wonderfully fresh.

Ray