When it comes to people, my preferred role is observer. I love photography, but I very rarely photograph people. There’s the odd photo I’ve taken of Joe, and the odd occasion I’ve taken staff photos for headshots, but other than that I haven’t done much portraiture.

I don’t know anything about it, to be honest. I don’t know about posing people or anything like that – but what I do know is how to get people to genuinely relax. I’m a bit of a joker. You can always see it in the shots afterwards: the first awkward, uncertain facial expressions and then the truly natural ones where they’re laughing or smiling as they would in everyday life.

Even though there’s something satisfying about that in and of itself, I still was never into having people in my shots. Then something changed. I began thinking about how I could have people in my photos, but in different and interesting ways, and I started to introduce them a bit more.

I’ve put them together in the series below, which I’ve called “Silent Beings”. There’s a massive range when it comes to subject range, distance, height, time, and geographical location, but they all have a few things in common. They were all taken with my 70-200mm on my old entry-level Nikon D3100; they were all taken of strangers; they all capture a spontaneous moment. I didn’t ask any of them to pose, or do something a bit differently, or do something again. They’re all completely natural.

So here it is. Silent Beings.