The question of whether there’s a photograph I’ve taken that I’d class as my favourite is one that I’ve never really considered. Different photographs serve different purposes… they can be snapshots, serving merely to act as a memory jogger for a moment in time and be lacking technically, or they can be the culmination of a lot of work with a team in order to get that shot. I’ve got a lot of both, and a lot of shots that I love for those different reasons.

The picture I’ve chosen is a bit of a combination of those things, and it’s of a model, Amber Witcomb, in Lake Buttermere. It was from a main fashion shoot for Harper’s Bazaar, and I’d thought about the concept and the story for the best part of a year before finally getting up to the Lake District one cold and wet November a few years ago. Amber and I had spoken a few times before the shoot about how we’d do the shots in the ice cold water, which I think was around 4 or 5 degrees. We agreed that whether I’d got the shot or not, she’d be in the water for a maximum of 3 minutes. It was a massive team effort to get these pictures, and there are so many technical challenges when working in water, let alone when it’s miserable winter weather, so there’s about 12 people and a lot of equipment and gear just out of shot to the left… mainly thermos flasks of tea, hot water bottles, towels and dry robes to warm us up afterwards!