I stopped halfway across the Millennium Bridge and pointed the camera north, which turned out to be the same thing roughly nine thousand other people were doing that afternoon. I looked behind me and there was another group of tourists with their phones raised taking much the same photo I have here. St. Paul’s Cathedral…

There was a single boat on our little corner of the Lakes of Killarney. I’d walked down from O’Sullivan’s Cascade to join other photographers from Blarney Photography Club. They were busy photographing the same scene you see here and everything around them. We were enjoying the afternoon sunlight on a calm October day last year.

Fist in the air, beer in the other hand, in defiance of the rain that had been hammering down earlier. This is Las Fallas distilled into two men and a moment. I caught them mid-chant on one of the streets near the Plaza del Ayuntamiento. The man on the left had gone full traditional, with…

A pigeon had taken up residence in the Dubray Books window on St. Patrick Street, wedged comfortably between Michael Palin and a Lonely Planet guide which is frankly better taste in travel literature than most of us manage. It sat there among the carefully arranged display like it had been hired for the job, unbothered…

It’s impossible to miss this kiosk. A bright yellow box parked outside Spitalfields Market, looking like it had been teleported in from a 1960s sci-fi film set. This is a K67 kiosk. It’s a modular street unit designed by Slovenian architect Saša Mächtig in 1966 and one of the most successful pieces of street furniture…

I nearly walked straight past it. You’re on the South Bank, dodging cyclists, and there’s this railway bridge overhead that most people treat as a ceiling to hurry under. But look up and the underside of Blackfriars Railway Bridge is a riot of riveted iron girders fanning out like the ribs of some enormous mechanical…

I caught this one from barely a metre away. It was close enough to count the grey in his beard, close enough that the glass roof of Spitalfields Market softened into geometry behind them. It was early in the morning and the market was still being set up. I wonder if they were tourists in…

We’d come out of the train station at Liverpool Street earlier in the morning but when I walked past here, I stopped dead on Bishopsgate, tilted the camera straight up, and watched three towers race each other into a sky that looked like it was about to pick a fight. The central building’s white steel…

I’m not sure what was so engrossing on that phone but I suspect it was a review of images, especially outside the Bank of England in London and those enormous Portland stone columns. A perfect place for a dramatic photoshoot.

I can just imagine the conversation here, “Just one more photo and then we’re done!” What I like about this moment is that it’s completely unselfconscious. They’re in their own world while the crowd flows around them. There’s a nice irony in being a street photographer photographing someone photographing someone else, a little Russian doll…

Look up and notice that 160 years of history are stacked vertically in the same sightline in London. At the bottom of the frame is the ornate ironwork crest of the London, Chatham and Dover Railway, dated 1864, sitting on its stone parapet like it’s been there forever (because it basically has). And rising directly…

This is what I love about shooting London with a telephoto lens. You compress the layers of the city together and suddenly the relationship between people and architecture becomes absurd.