Arts Council’s ‘Developing Your Creative Practice’
In 2025, I was supported using public funding by the National Lottery through Arts Council England’s ‘Developing Your Creative Practice’ grant to explore how my documentary photography practice could extend into heritage and archaeology. After fifteen years photographing weddings, events and street photography, I’d spent the last few years increasingly drawn to a different kind of subject: capturing archaeology, heritage landscapes and the relationship between people and place over time. This grant gave me the opportunity to properly explore this emerging area of interest through focused skills development in digital arts, rather than picking it up in the gaps between paid work.
This page is a record of what I did with that time; the skills I developed, what I learned about my own practice along the way, and where I think it’s heading next. I’m grateful to Arts Council England and the National Lottery for supporting me in exploring this new discipline, which I now consider a core part of my creative practice.
What the funding let me do
Learning by doing
I spent most of this period learning drone photogrammetry from the ground up: flight planning, processing the captures into 3D models, and getting those models online in a way that’s actually useful to members of the public and archaeologists.
Before getting into the nuts & bolts of photogrammetry and 3D models, I had to get to grips with flying a drone; the legalities surrounding it, as well as the somewhat murky waters of where you can and can’t take off and fly from. This video is a short clip from my first flight. (I accidentally had it set to both cinematic mode, which slows and smooths out the movements of the controls, and slow-mo, which made the whole thing so slow you might think you were looking at a photo. So I sped it up a bit.)
I should add that I found myself having to overcome quite a bit of social anxiety for these first few flights. Not only was I learning a new piece of equipment, but I was also taking it out into public spaces. Turns out, the few dog-walkers that passed me in this field were nothing but polite, and barely batted an eyelid!
After a few test flights, I was able to turn my attention to archaeological sites, including active community dig trenches. That meant working through real problems as they came up; colour accuracy issues, mesh cleanup, figuring out how to combine drone and handheld shots to properly cover a 5x15m trench, rather than following a tidy tutorial (though I also did plenty of tidy tutorials along the way!).
Filling the gaps myself
I previously attended a short course in QGIS for beginners and brought this knowledge into this project, where I’d planned to take additional in-person courses in further QGIS and photogrammetry. In the end, I found that online tutorials and self-directed learning got me to the same place, faster, more flexibly, and let me redirect that time into more hands-on practice instead. Alongside that, I had mentoring sessions with two specialists in arts and participatory practices: John Whall and Peter Bonnell. Peter is an experienced curator and visual artist, and my sessions with him not only introduced me to pieces such as ‘A Line Made by Walking’ by Richard Long, and ‘The Black Tower’ by John Smith, but encouraged me to think about what I wanted to achieve from the project, and allowed me to consider it from an autobiographical angle. John is skilled in digital participation in arts and culture, and his guidance helped shape both the technical direction and how I thought about presenting this work. Introducing me to apps like Scaniverse, really gave me a push into being able to engage with the community in this project. Seeing people’s faces as they realise the phone in their pocket can create 3D models in minutes, was wonderful!
The models
Situated on Ramsley Moor in the Derbyshire Peak District are the Barbrook stone circles. What was initially meant to be a recce for access, parking, and how busy it was, turned into creating this 3D model from hand-held still images. As I was to find out later, flying drones in these parts isn’t advised by the Peak District National Park during ground nesting bird season, so I was happy to have had my stills camera along for this trip. It was my first experience of shooting with photogrammetry in mind – considering the shadows and how the software would handle changing lighting conditions (pretty well, it seems!)
Glapwell is situated in the North-East of Derbyshire, and a resident of the village (and local councillor), Colton Lee, has started a small community group around the history & archaeology of the area. Taking over the running & administration of the Derbyshire Archaeological Society’s Facebook page has enabled me to start building up a network of contacts, and Colton was one of the first people I started talking to about their heritage project. After months of emails, messages, and a few site visits, I was invited up to a small community dig that was organised at Glapwell, and asked to create a 3D model of the completed excavation. It was great to be a part of an actual community archaeology dig and to be able to provide a 3D model of the finished 2m square trench. Many people from the group’s Facebook page and Whatsapp chat were unable to attend and were grateful for the chance to be able to not just see photos, but to be able to interact with a digital model of the trench, which was filled in minutes after I’d finished taking the images for this model.
Who I’ve connected with
Putting these new skills to use on real sites brought me into contact with people I wouldn’t otherwise have worked alongside. At the Glapwell dig, archaeologist Tom Parker was the dig supervisor. After I created the 3D model of the trench, Tom asked for orthomosaics and section slices from the model, which told me the outputs were actually useful to a working archaeologist, not just a nice-looking record.
I’ve also built on relationships with Andrés Pérez Arana and Colin Merrony, both at the University of Sheffield, whose expertise in geophysics and landscape archaeology has shaped how I think about photographic recording as one part of a wider toolkit rather than a standalone output. I’m now working with them both on further community archaeology projects.
And through photographing York Archaeology’s We Dig Derventio project, I’ve connected with their Community Engagement Manager, Laura Parker; a relationship that’s since turned into paid commission work, which says something about where this is heading.
What I learned and how the activity helped me to develop
Some of this period was straightforwardly technical: learning photogrammetry software from scratch, learning how to actually shoot for photogrammetry (thinking about overlap, angles, lighting consistency; quite different from event photography instincts), and understanding the technical detail of building a 3D model that’s high enough quality to be useful, but light enough to actually upload and share.
Working across different kinds of subjects pushed that learning further than any one type of site would have. A test pit or trench is temporary and changes daily, so I had to learn to capture fast and completely, knowing there’s no going back for a reshoot. A standing structure like a stone or water tower gave me time to be more deliberate; multiple passes, testing angles, refining technique without the same time pressure. Learning to shoot well in both conditions, and adapt my approach to each, has been as valuable as the software itself.
I also learned something less expected: how much people respond to being able to move a model around themselves. Showing someone a 3D model they can rotate and explore, almost as if they were standing there, is a different experience from showing them a photograph, especially for people who’ve never seen one before. Sharing simple ways to do this themselves, with apps like Scaniverse, and watching people work out what they could apply it to, was genuinely rewarding, and it’s fed directly into wanting to push further into community engagement.
Technically, this showed up most clearly in the problems I had to work through rather than follow from a tutorial: getting consistent colour through the RealityScan-to-Sketchfab pipeline, cleaning up meshes without losing real detail, and working out how to combine drone and handheld capture to properly cover a trench. None of that came from a course; it came from getting it wrong on-site and fixing it. The 3D model of the water tower was a challenge for me; still getting to grips with drone flight planning, and having the drone stop the flight midway through capture, led to me having to manually fly and capture the images. The resulting model looks great from one side, but if you spin it around, the tower now has a huge, full-height opening that definitely wasn’t there when I visited. A glitch in the processing due to incomplete coverage.
Where this is heading
The Peak District National Park Authority commissioned me for three days to photograph heritage events as part of their People of the Peak project, and Laura Parker of York Archaeology paid me to photograph this year’s We Dig Derventio dig, including photogrammetry, having had me volunteer the year before. Going from unpaid to paid, and from one-off to being asked back, is the clearest evidence I have that this is a genuine second strand of practice.
I’m now in the early stages of setting up a Community Interest Company for community archaeology and well-being, which has come about largely due to my DYCP funding. I’m also leading an effort to bring community archaeological fieldwork back to the Derbyshire Archaeological Society ahead of its 150th anniversary in 2028, part of which has led to me submitting a funding enquiry to the National Lottery Heritage Fund to support that work over a longer period. That future project should also give me time to properly fix things this development period exposed rather than solved: the pre-programmed drone flight planning, and a repeatable way of teaching people with no technical background to capture and view digital 3D models themselves.
One thing I didn’t expect from this period was how much I’d enjoy the engagement side of it: showing people what’s possible with this technology and watching them work out what they could do with it. That’s become a real driver for wanting to go further into community engagement, not just recording sites myself.
It’s changed how I present my work, too. Where before that meant building a gallery of finished images for a client to look through, now it’s turned into something people can actually interact with: showing up at a community event with a laptop and letting people rotate a 3D model themselves, rather than just look at a photo of a find or a trench. That’s a genuinely different way of sharing work, and this page is the start of building that out properly, alongside the wedding & event photography portfolio I already have.
Biggest step change in practice: Using 3D, 360 and interactive technologies has shown me how to capture and present place over time in an engaging way – for people to enjoy as its own artistic value, but also to give them the chance to experience a moment and a place for themselves.
Photography and archaeology were two interests I was juggling before this. They’re a single, developing practice now, with paid work coming in, a growing network behind it, and a clear next step already underway.
