2011 has been an incredible year; here is a small selection of my favourite images.

Each year it would seem professional photographers create a ‘best of’ gallery. This year to keep with the current trend I thought I would put together my favourite pictures of 2011. At first this seemed like an easy task, trawl through past albums, pick of my favourites, and write a few words about them.

Well I can tell you that for me this has been a difficult task, firstly, I have taken 18525 photographs this year and secondly, photography and more importantly capturing a moment or a story, is about the emotion as much as the technical aspect and because of this, my choice of images may or may not fit into the category of ‘great photographs’. Everybody has their own opinions of what they find interesting, creative, cute, funny or abstract, and I hope that at least some of the images below will provoke some of these thoughts.

2011 has been an amazing year in the development of my photography, it’s also been incredibly busy with 38 weddings, 54 portrait sittings, 7 commercial shoot, 3 motorsport events and 1 airshow. I even had 5 days this year photographing fine art antiques worth an eye watering amount of money. I would like to thank each and every one of my clients, without them I would not be able to continue with my passion of photography.

Some of these pictures don’t really need any words to tell a story, however, some thoughts I would like to share with you of a few of them. I hope you enjoy looking through them as much as I have taking them this year. Please click here for more information about my Lake district wedding photography.

This photograph of a 12 week old spaniel seems to show how peaceful and settled she was. I managed to get this image towards the end of a 45min shoot; also there was a second 12 week old spaniel and a terrier. Lots of running, playing chewing and biting later, she sat still long enough to get this image.

Normally at weddings I usually photograph the bridal preparations, on this occasion I had arrived very early and this shot of the groom, best man and the 2 fathers sipping malt whiskey is one of my favourites from the whole wedding.

This picture brought a tear to my eye, the young boy had been asked to take the rings to the front, I was there when they had a couple of practices and it didn’t go that well but when his moment came his little face just lit up and he performed his duties perfectly. The look of pride on his mother’s face just adds to this picture.

I had spotted this girl looking around during the service and had slowly crept a little way down the aisle and just waited for her to look around, it was only a quick glance that she gave me, I took 2 images together and the second one showed she has already looked away.

I just love the fascination that this little girl has while the bride to be and her mother sort the wedding dress out.

This picture I find very abstract, it was taken against Wordsworth House in Cockermouth and almost has a Mediterranean look about it.

This is one of those moments you just wait and hope for, the bride just looked up to see the waiting groom and the wonderful look of pride of her father’s face. The wedding was at Winder Hall and it’s always great to get the chance to photograph outside ceremonies.

This year I travelled done to Fairford in Gloucestershire to photography the Royal Air Tattoo, I took over 2000 images and I have so many that I would love to share but I chose this one showing the absolute power of a Typhoon jet taking off, the heat haze just makes this picture for me. As you can imagine the noise was quite tremendous!

This image was taken in one of the darkest hotels I have come across; using flash would have completely ruined the images so I just used the ambient spots lights in the ceiling to create this wonderful wedding photograph.

This was one of the wettest weddings I have ever photographed and to me this image summed it all up. The bride is finding the funny side, the chauffeur is looking very concerned and her father is looking a bit fed up with the weather.

This image was taken at a recent shoot involving the model, Beauty Simply Make-up and Katie Simpson Hair. It was a great collaboration between us all and we managed to achieve the look we were all after.

I would just like to wish everybody a happy, healthy and prosperous New Year.