Hover or tab across any frame above and it lifts under a drawn loupe, the way Walter would once have held an actual loupe over a sheet of prints on the light table. It is a small thing, but it is how this studio has always looked at its own work — one frame at a time, unhurried, before deciding which one earns a print.

The family sitting is a fairly typical Saturday: three generations squeezed onto the studio sofa, photographed in the same north light Walter chose in 1957. The wedding frame is Ludlow Castle’s gatehouse arch, the most-photographed backdrop in our own archive. The boardroom portrait is one of forty we shot in a single afternoon for a Shrewsbury accountancy firm, each lit to match so the whole set could hang together in reception. The restoration frame shows a genuinely repaired plate — a tear that ran clean through a face, rejoined by Priya over three sittings at the light table. The mortarboard is one of several hundred debut sittings we photograph every July, when the local schools finish their exams within the same fortnight. And the three overlapping circles are the closest thing we have to a family crest: Walter, Michael and Constance, photographed separately across sixty years and printed as one image for the studio’s sixtieth anniversary in 2017.

Nothing leaves the building. Every negative and every digital file from every sitting since 1957 stays in the archive, climate-controlled since we converted the old storeroom in 2009, catalogued by year and surname on a card index Walter started and Ben now keeps digitally in parallel. If a fire or a flood ever took the building, the most recent decade is also mirrored off-site — the rest, we accept, exists nowhere else, which is exactly why we are careful with it.

If you or a relative sat for us at any point since 1957, write in with an approximate date and names and we will search the index — most requests take under a week to locate, longer for anything before 1975 when the filing was, in Walter’s own words, "a work in progress". Reprints from the original are priced the same as our current print list, with a small research fee for anything requiring more than an hour in the archive. We do not release digital files from historic sittings without the original client’s written permission, out of respect for a promise Walter made in 1957 and never broke.

Everything on this page was made for a specific person on a specific day, which is worth saying plainly in an age of photographs made for nobody in particular. We do not shoot stock imagery, and we do not sell the rights to any sitting beyond the client who booked it. If a frame here catches your eye and you would like something in a similar style — the same arch, the same light, the same restrained retouching — the honest answer is simply to book a sitting of your own, and we will bring exactly that approach to it.