Driving up to Dartmoor on the day of the shoot didn’t look favourable, it was raining intensely and the roads were quite frankly horrendous. Riah and I had agreed to go ahead, despite the weather and I was hoping for some epic mist to give the forest a more ethereal look. The conditions, whilst not pleasant, definitely added another element to the shoot.

For the longest time, my photography felt aimless. I’d grab my camera, wander wherever I pleased, and shoot whatever caught my eye—a shadow falling just right, an interesting building, or a fleeting moment between strangers. While there were commonalities in my images—my preference for black and white, my compositional style—something always felt missing. There was no unifying thread, no overarching story, no reason tying it all together. My work felt scattered, more like a collection of fragments than a cohesive narrative.

But achieving a decent black and white conversion from a colour, digital image is actually quite hard. I edit my work in Lightroom Classic and sure, there is a one click b&w conversion and there are even b&w presets specifically for portraits and landscapes and everything in between. But to me, the results are far from pleasing, the results are often just plain old 18% grey. Middle grey, to me, is NOT black and white. There should be a broad tonal range across the image, from deep blacks to crisp whites (I’m pretty sure there’s a photographer who designed a whole system around this concept, but I’m not in the zone for talking about that today). Instead, what I am going to talk about, is how through some trial and error, I’ve created a preset in Lightroom that acts a starting point for what I call “Perfect black and white”.

In my last post about the “One Crew” RNLI portrait project, I talked about how I ended up shooting all of the images on the rear deck of the All Weather Lifeboat (ALB) inside the boat hall at the lifeboat station in Exmouth, Devon. In this post, I’m going to talk about how I physically crafted each image, some of the techniques I used during the shoot and during the editing phase in order to create the final images that you can see in my portfolio.

Exmouth, Devon, is a photographer's dream: golden beaches, sweeping estuary views, dramatic skies, and a vibrant community. But for me, as a local photographer, this familiarity can sometimes feel like a creative double-edged sword. How do you keep capturing the same surroundings with fresh eyes? How do you push yourself to find new perspectives in a place you know so intimately?

This shift in approach has made the project even more meaningful to me. It’s a reminder that creativity is as much about adaptation as it is about vision. As I continue to photograph and learn more about the extraordinary people who make up Exmouth RNLI, I’m excited to share the stories behind the portraits and the moments that make this crew so remarkable.

I reached out to the media officer at my local station in Exmouth in Devon to see if there was any appetite for my project. There was, but it became a fairly lengthy and drawn out process as I navigated the complexities of data protection and copyright. As I travelled this path, my vision began to develop. I realised that it wasn’t just about the boat crew.