It was a thrill to be given the job of shooting adidas’ campaign for the launch of next year’s World Cup ball - ‘Trionda’.
To photograph one World Cup winning legend would have been a thrill, but to shoot 8 in the same frame was quite surreal. All credit to adidas for that logistical masterclass.
@adidas@FIFAWorldCup
A big thank you to Michael and Janine at @adidas and to Nadia, Luke, Matt and Cal at @the_midnight_club - it was an honour.
Paris 1998. Munich 2024. Boston 2026.
No Scotland, No Party.
Join us for an evening of entertainment hosted by Fred MacAulay on the eve of Scotland’s first World Cup game for 10,217 days. We are thrilled and honoured to have Susan Boyle, Skerryvore, Nathan Evans & the Saint Phnx Band, and Johnny Mac & The Faithful as part of our perfomer list - with more acts to be announced soon.
All proceeds from the evening will benefit Street Soccer Scotland - in an evening that celebrates our great Nation and the achievement of this team, there is no more suitable organisation to benefit.
Limited tickets still available at NoScotlandNoParty2026.com
Scotland showed its very best colours last week — spring sunshine and Loch Lomond, Gleneagles and Edinburgh looked magnificent. More importantly, 3 consecutive nights of Charity dinners highlighted that Scots give generously to those less fortunate. Empathy is alive and kicking north of the border. Together the events for Debra and Social Bite raised £2.5m — an astonishing amount and testimony to the integrity and importance of both charities.
The David Yarrow Family Foundation has its heart and soul in Scotland and we are honoured to just play a small role. We are delighted that kind people allowed our work to raise over £300,000 during the course of the week.
The DYFF’s next big event is in Boston on 12th June — please continue to get in touch re tickets — it’s 90% sold now.
NoScotlandNoParty2026.com
NEW podcast episode is up! “How to Simplify Your Life in 2026 — New Tips from Anne Lamott, Claire Hughes Johnson, David Yarrow, and Diana Chapman”
Many of us feel like we’re drowning in invisible complexity. So I wanted to hit pause and ask a simple question: What are 1–3 decisions that could dramatically simplify my life in 2026?
To explore that, I invited five long-time listener favorites: Anne Lamott, Claire Hughes Johnson, David Yarrow, and Diana Chapman.
Please enjoy!
Bohemian Rhapsody
When we filmed a retro skiing story outside the Woody Creek Tavern, the VW van we used that day resonated with the locals and the photograph sold out. It played to the lore of a freewheeling, liberal Aspen.
So, we brought the same van back and this time played to a summer bohemian narrative. My preconception involved a Fleetwood Mac vibe and a sense of a 1970s hipster lock-in at the Woody Creek Tavern. Most of all, I just wanted to be playful and allow for a character-rich tableau. There had to be a sense that we were looking at largely untamed people.
Period photographs like this need layers to tell the full story and in my experience, a sense of location is often a most necessary component. The WCT is such a legendary location and brings an immediate sense of vice and mischief to the set. I am not sure I can think of another location in Aspen that could command such a clear throwback storyline. That is a useful asset for a storyteller and ties all the other components together.
We are very lucky to have become friends with the owners of the WCT - Craig and Samantha Cordts-Pearce and to have partnered with them on several occasions in the past few years. They know my team well and know that we can run up a bar bill. It is such a happy place and I think that always filters down to the cast members we bring. This is a place to have a good time and celebrate life.
My instincts were to have the colours in this picture desaturated - this gives a faded vintage warmth to the print - a bit dreamlike. After all, the 70s were something of dream for most of the clientele at The Woody Creek Tavern.
A celebration of Rory McIlroy’s Career Grand Slam at Giant’s Causeway, Northern Ireland.
An honour to have been a part of this - thank you @rorymcilroy .
Drill, Baby, Drill
Southwest of Midland, Texas, the Permian oil basin has a sugar coating of green. This is well irrigated agricultural land and whilst there may be an abundance of oil below the surface, it is the rich green from the cotton fields that is visible.
When location scouting, I was immediately drawn to this feature and the horizontal skyline accompanying it. The symmetry is only broken by the signs that this is one of the world’s great oil reserves - the Permian contributes over 5% of daily world oil production. Straight dusty roads run through the green fields to the numerous pump jacks that extend to the horizon. It is a Hydrocarbon “War of the Worlds”.
I was reminded of Andreas Gursky’s famous photograph “Rhine” which played to parallel lines, symmetry and spatial distancing and some creative ideas began to marinate in my mind. I also then remembered the PR imagery for the Oscar winning film - Green Book - and I saw how a car story could be told against this most giving of backdrops.
We had access to an outstanding car prop in a 1959 Pontiac Bonneville. This long, iconic American car needs to be photographed in profile to celebrate its length. I sensed that if I filmed with the late afternoon light, the white car would ping against the green and if I was somewhat elevated, the distance compression would work well. There were many factors at play that evening in the cotton fields and I think we played most of them as well as we could.
The result is pure Americana and one of my stronger works over the last few years. It pays homage to a special part of the world and America’s greatest natural asset. Taylor Sheriden’s Landman has made West Texas sexy and I hope the story here endorses that.
We would like to thank Cody Campbell and his alumni friends from Texas Tech for their help in the Permian basin. They are good landmen.
Florida
Every state in America has its own unique characteristics that shape outsiders’ perceptions: New York is the world’s business epicenter; Texas has cowboys and oil; whilst Alaska is the final frontier. Our cognitive processing tends to elicit visual symbolisms that are consensual - mention the word “Nevada” and we think of gambling in a desert.
But Florida is more complicated. It cannot be conveniently categorised or boxed. On the coast is Miami, with its tourist beaches, Art Deco, influencers, pop culture and Hispanic soul. Then up the road is Palm Beach with its genteel “Slim Aarons” high-society life of golf, tennis, bridge and cocktails.
The two communities could not be more different in culture and ethnicity. They only have two things in common: favourable taxes and proximity to America’s Jurassic Park - an untamed territory that remains primeval and largely closed for business. The swamps of Florida were not made for human life, yet they sit within 30 miles of two of the most evolved and desirable places to live in the world. It is as stark a visual dislocation as there can be.
In no part of America does the price of real estate fall quicker than when travelling west from the Atlantic beaches of southern Florida. There are too many insects and far too many dangerous reptiles for sane mankind.
The emblematic beast of Florida is the alligator and for the 56,000 students at the University of Florida, life would be different if “Gators” did not exist. The big gators in the swamps are formidable adversaries.
This photograph was only captured after considerable research and conversations with those familiar with the location. The camera was controlled remotely, and no one was in danger during this project. Alligators are much more comfortable living in this part of Florida than humans will ever be.
If Florida was fictional, we would laugh at its absurdity. And yet it is very real.
Vice
There is a nod to Ridley Scott’s Thelma and Louise in this photograph. The iconic girl power movie from 1991 has been a material prompt for me - especially in terms of using the grandeur of the American West as a layer of narrative in car stories. The addition of police cars to this set makes the nod even more emphatic.
Location scouting is an integral part of visual storytelling and more often than not, a possible location we have discovered during desk work, does not pass the test when we do a site visit. That’s good, as there needs to a be high bar in what we perceive to be a strong contextual background. We are greedy operators when it comes to filling the screen.
The Trona Pinnacles are remote and that always helps to provide some privacy in what we do, especially if we film in the early morning in the off season. I can’t really remember scheduling a shoot in the American West in the summer months; it just gets more complicated.
Road trips are good for team bonding; it gives us time to think and reflect on what we can do better in the creative process. Being out and about in the great American West should always be more productive than sitting behind a desk. I do think I mentally land on some of my better conceptual ideas when looking out from a car window.
Thank you to @josiecanseco for always being a great partner in our projects - there is nobody we would rather road trip with.
Wall Street Stories
I was on duty at the Sundance Film Festival in Utah, when forecasts of a massive cross-state winter storm started to hit TV channels. The storm would stretch North East all the way from Texas to Boston and what particularly interested me was the expectation of a foot of snow in one day in New York City.
I had always wanted to photograph Manhattan in an intense blizzard and the fortunate news was the storm was going to land on a Sunday when most public areas would be light of working people. Anyone sensible or anyone following the new Mayor’s advice would not be leaving home.
I am familiar with the area immediately outside the NYSE building, having filmed there before and recognised its visual potential in a white out. I had just enough time to organise our “wolf” and his handlers to get up from California, but speaking engagements restricted me to flying in on the red eye on Saturday night and hoping to arrive before JFK shut.
As it was, I made it from Salt Lake City with a couple of hours to spare and then, as predicted, the city was hit with the biggest one-day snowfall since 1905. These are the opportunities we long for and thanks to quick thinking and good logistical back up from my team, I was exactly where I needed to be. This was about to be an historic day in the epicentre of the world.
By about 11am, snow was accumulating at 2 inches an hour and filming a subject further than 3 feet from the camera was challenging. However, the composition I was looking for would necessitate the wolf being very close and then working with my most extreme wide-angle lens. My preference was for the wolf’s face to be caked in snow and the conditions guaranteed that.
A bonus was that the extreme cold served to amplify the steam escaping through one of the nearby maintenance holes. This added to the visual depth of a New York story and I knew I could use the steam to my advantage.
In the Beginning
Bison have roamed in Yellowstone National Park since Prehistoric times; indeed they thrived in an Ice Age that claimed both the mammoth and the horse. That is why I am drawn to Yellowstone in the winter as it is their stoicism in extreme weather that defines them.
The photograph is certainly up there for me, so many variables came together at 25 degrees below zero in the Flood Geyser section of the Park. Finding a large frost caked bull bison early in the morning is always a good start, but then to find him close to geysers is a bonus.
These geysers normally omit a steady flow of gentle steam - a bit like an outdoor hot tub in a luxury ski resort - and when I gingerly approached the bull, that was my contextual background. Nothing too dramatic, but the steam evoked a sense of occasional geological activity and gave an emphatic nod to the location. There is a restlessness to the mood.
But then after three minutes lying on the frozen ground, the geyser in front of me erupted, spewing water and steam 100 meters into the air. To give this context, the spectacle doesn’t happen every day and, on this occasion, the early sun was offering a generous level of backlight and the bison and I had front row seats. It was my very own Field of Dreams, albeit a little troubling as I had no prior knowledge of the radius of the thermal water. I relied on the bison as he had better info and seemed quite calm.
I care so much about the background layer in my work; it is pivotal to the art of storytelling. Sometimes it is entirely in our control, but on this occasion, it was a pure stroke of luck. Arguably I have never worked with a more spectacular backdrop in my career. It was akin to a Game of Thrones mood board.
We are left with a timeless freak of a photograph that pays homage to the raw wonders of this planet. It is primeval to its core and a celebration of one of the most untamed parts of the world. It was an honour to see it all unfold on my own at 8.15am that January morning.
I am reminded again that “the early bird catches the worm”.
