Hi, I’m Eric.

I’d never seen anything like it. The stand was busy, the family was browsing the Christmas markets, and Hamburg in December is its full magical self — so we kept moving. But the photographs stuck with me. I’d never thought about the inside of an eye as something you could put on a wall.

A few months later we were on another cruise, this time over Easter, and there it was again. This time we stopped. I had the free preview, the family did too. We loved it. A print came home with us and ended up on the wall, and every time I walked past it I thought the same thing: someone should be doing this in Dorset.

So I taught myself. I’d already had a camera in my hand for fifteen years by then as a hobby — so the photography side wasn’t the unknown. Iris work is its own craft though, and that part I learned from scratch. I bought the macro kit, worked out the lighting, learned the editing, kept refining. There are surprisingly few iris studios in the UK and almost all of them are in the big cities — which is fine if you live in one of them, less fine if you’ve got a family and a Saturday morning and you’d rather not drive to London. There was a gap on the south coast. So I filled it.

In March 2025 I set up at the Dolphin Centre in Poole for the first time. Since then I’ve photographed thousands of irises and I’m still trying to get better at it — every session, every edit, every print. The craft keeps improving and I don’t think it ever stops.

The one thing that hasn’t changed from day one is the free preview. I want you to genuinely love the photograph before you decide how to display it. No pressure, no obligation — just sit down, see your own eye, and choose for yourself.