It all began with a short service in St Paul’s Cathedral before the Archbishop of Canterbury set off with her husband and a small team on their Pilgrimage to Canterbury Cathedral. That was on Tuesday 17th of March. I photographed the blessing and the first few miles of their 87 mile journey before leaving them at Rotherhithe to go and edit my pictures. A couple of days later I joined them again at Aylesford Priory for a couple of hours and then dipped in and out of the pilgrimage before covering the last couple of miles as they walked from Chartham to Canterbury itself.

A few days later I was back in Canterbury covering the build-up to the big day (that’s a twenty picture photo-essay in itself) and the official Installation of The Most Reverend and Right Honourable Dame Sarah Mullally DBE as the 106th Archbishop of Canterbury. I spent the next couple of days photographing a whole string of meetings she had with Anglican, Christian and other Faith leaders.

After a few days rest we were into Holy Week and shooting pictures on Maundy Thursday, Good Friday and Easter Sunday in and around Canterbury and its’ beautiful Cathedral.

When I sat down to write this blog post I started to go into enormous detail about what I did, why I did it and all sorts of technical stuff about taking pictures and delivering them under pretty tough conditions. I stopped and just wrote a very brief outline of what I had done because I wanted to make it about the images. So that’s what I have done. I’ve picked out a dozen photographs from my time spent with our wonderful new Archbishop.

For those desperate for some technical notes, you are going to have to read right to the end of the post. Before then, here’s the other eleven frames;

Technical stuff: I used three different cameras on the various days. Two EOS R6 MkII bodies and one EOSR5 MkII body. Inside the cathedral I was shooting at between 2000 ISO and 25,600 ISO depending on how much light there was. The installation itself had a lot of supplemental lighting provided by the outside broadcast company working on behalf of The BBC. There are lots of lenses involved. All of them are Canon RF; 14-35 f4L, 24-105 f4L, 70-200 f4L, 100-500 f4.5-7.1L with a couple of frames on the 85 f2. Inside the cathedral a lot of pictures are shot at relatively slow shutter speeds – especially with the 100-500 which proved that as long as the subject is reasonably still you really can hand-hold it at 1/60th of a second.

A wide selection of JPEG pictures were uploaded live via FTP to a PhotoShelter account where the social media teams could get access to them very quickly and then re-edited and replaced by versions from the RAW files later the same day. Every picture I sent out live had a pre-defined IPTC caption applied automatically in camera. These were uploaded to the cameras using the excellent Canon Content Transfer Professional app on my iPhone.

For the installation itself I was joined by Andrew Baker and Tim Bishop to give us a far wider selection of pictures.

I’m not sure what else people might want to know, so if you have any questions I will try to answer them.