All language subtitles for 5. 2002–2014

In the mid '90s, in sort of parallel with the work

that I was starting to do in the film industry

and the photo journalism I was still doing,

I started working quite intensively with my brother, Olly,

and his painting partner, Suzy,

who were the art partnership, Olly and Suzy.

And Olly and Suzy paint predators in endangered landscapes

in the Arctic, desert, ocean, and jungle wildernesses.

And we had the most extraordinary

few years of traveling together.

We spent two weeks tracking white wolves

in Ellesmere Island in Northern, Northern, Northern Canada.

We went to the North Pole, we documented polar bears,

we went on numerous trips to Africa, working with big game.

We were fortunate enough to go to the Galapagos Islands,

and we saw many, many extraordinary things.

And this stuff wasn't a particularly commercial endeavor

and it wasn't done at a time

that I was particularly commercially minded,

certainly not as commercially minded as I am today.

But it's an incredibly important part of, I suppose,

my journey as a photographer

and also the journey of my life, they're some of

the most extraordinary experiences of my life.

I look back on those times

when you really are in the middle of nowhere

for a long period of time, and I suppose,

you just get into a different groove

and look for different things.

Anyway, hugely important part of my life.

Shooting Bond was a terrific leg up for me,

and it led to me working on more and more films

and to doing more and more portraits.

And I sort of went through this very difficult phase

that probably lasted a year or two,

where the jobs got bigger and bigger and bigger,

and I really hadn't learnt my lighting still.

And it's sad 'cause it's a period of my work

that I look back on

where I had extraordinary access to talent, and really,

in my opinion, grossly under delivered the photographs.

But what it did do is it really gave me

that kick up the arse I needed

to really start studying lighting

and studying that kind of photography.

I remember once, I went to do a shoot with Cate Blanchett,

and one of the concepts was to shoot her

in this sort of beautiful old 19 sort of 20s,

1930s Hurrell lighting,

Hurrell was a famous Hollywood portraitist in that time.

And I literally bought a book

that was old Hollywood portraits and how to light them.

And I bought this book and read it on the plane

flying out to LA to do the shoot.

But it sort of started

a process of really learning about light.

Another very important thing for me

was the photographer, Simon Norfolk,

who I'd known for years from being in an agency

called "Select" with him, a news agency,

early, early in my career.

And Simon used to light things,

and Simon basically came and saw me at my office one day

and put up a couple of lights

and gave me my first sort of tutorial in lighting

where he sort of brought a ball and a box

and just showed the difference between light,

how light hits as it moves around a sphere

or as it moves around a cube.

And so, basically, I knuckled down

and I started really learning.

I also started working with an assistant

at the time called Steve Jackson,

who remains one of my best friends in the world.

And Steve also took his role to another level.

You know, he got trained as an electrician,

really started to understand working with these huge lights,

huge power, making things safe.

And I suppose, in that respect,

over the course of the next four or five years,

we really, really got our lighting down.

It started with strobe,

and then increasingly moved into hot lights.

And we started getting more and more highly commercial work.

So we started doing big celebrity endorsed

luxury advertising campaigns,

we'd shoot campaigns for clothing brands,

for watches, jewelry, electronics, and fragrances,

which is one of the highest paid sort of jobs you can get

in commercial photography, in my kind of world.

And as I got more and more of this work,

I got taken on by a huge agency in New York,

and moved to America

and started doing more and more of these big shoots,

but less and less of them.

And it got to the point that I stopped carrying my camera.

And I always used to have a camera on me,

and I stopped carrying my camera.

And in reality,

I probably worked one or two days a month photographing,

and the rest of the time was trying to get work.

And the day rates were much higher.

And I was slowly but surely

falling out of love with photography.

The projects were getting bigger,

I couldn't do anything without a big crew and big generators

and big lights and big everything.

And I suppose that continued and it sort of hit a point of,

I suppose, where I was least happy,

which also coincided with the breakup of my marriage,

to my first wife.

We had two kids together, and I suppose there was something,

a culmination of all these things

led to a real low point in my life where my earnings,

which had got really high, dropped dramatically.

And suddenly, I was dealing with divorce

and losing homes and all this sort of stuff.

And when that happens, it's incredibly hard

for your personal life to go down

and your work life to also not follow suit.

You're effectively trying to put

all the toothpaste back in the tube and fix your life,

and you can't be fixing your life

and finding a home

and trying to sort of live a new life

whilst just happily continuing a professional career.

It's incredibly difficult.

So my career did really tank,

and things got really difficult.