Photo taken by photographer Jack Babbington during the photographers visit to the top of the nearly finished 155m Octagon skyscraper at the Paradise Birmingham development in September 2024.

Hi everyone!

I grew up in south-east London and moved to Birmingham in 1994.

I have been taking photos since the age of 10, starting with motor racing when going to see the rallycross with my parents and family holidays using an Halina 110 film format with two built-in lenses and a flash. I would send off the films for processing and had to endure an almost intolerable wait of a couple of weeks for the prints to arrive. When they did arrive it was better than birthdays and Christmas!

It was not until I went to college that I did any ‘serious’ photography, including developing and printing.

In 1997 I went to Chicago with my father and took a small 35mm snapper. I took many photos of the huge buildings there, I was obsessed with skyscrapers and still am. I wanted to capture the feeling of standing at the base of a massive skyscraper unlike anything I had ever seen.

I had found myself in Birmingham starting my first job in the television industry in 1994 and, although I had the typical south-east perception of the place, but had never been before, I very quickly fell in love with the city and felt moved to use my photography as a way of dispelling all the negative myths about it. Inspired by my trip to Chicago I started to photograph what has become my adopted home city focusing on its diverse architecture and public spaces with a Nikon 35mm SLR.

In 1998 at the age of 30, I was diagnosed with high-functioning autism and started to understand more about my challenges and how to manage my anxiety levels better. I also understood why I had ‘special interests’, photography of architecture was definitely one of my strongest, I love looking at maps and have over seventy different atlases, I love skyscrapers and satellite photography, I can’t get enough of Google Earth!

I bought my first digital SLR camera in 2008 and started to accumulate a large collection of photos of Birmingham. I showed some of them to friends and family and was overwhelmed by the positive feedback and encouragement I received.

In 2010 I produced a set of ten Birmingham postcards, had 200 of each printed and managed to get a few small city shops to sell them. The venture didn’t succeed very well and I lost interest in photography.

In 2013 I had been working as a freelance video editor for a large company consistently for 18-months. The 3 hours of driving every day and extremely difficult working conditions resulted in so much stress that I became ill with clinical depression and anxiety disorder and had to cease work as a freelancer.

As part of my recovery, I was encouraged to indulge my ’special interests’ and chose to further my Birmingham promotion project by publishing my photography through social media. In 2014 I started to publish some of my archive of photos of the city but also started to take many more on a regular basis. I had fantastic feedback, I have continued ever since, posting over 13k photos of Birmingham on X/Twitter.

I was encouraged by a good friend to develop a distinctive style and I had already identified several things that I naturally did. I love to use the ‘rule of thirds’ with my compositions, I like to find great juxtapositions, unusual perspectives, colours, reflections, abstracts, textures and odd ‘muddles’ of things that are hard to work out what’s going on at first glance. I seem to be able to see photographs waiting to be taken, I can ‘frame’ a scene instantly in my mind so I just need to use the camera to capture it.

In 2015 I became a regular contributor to the new @BirminghamWeAre Twitter account and have gone on to become a full development partner with the parent social media platform BirminghamWeAre.com.

Starting in 2016 as part of my extra-curricular work with BirminghamWeAre I designed and produced seven ‘Birmingham Gems’ charity calendars. These featured photography from Birmingham based enthusiast photographers, including some of mine, the calendars were an opportunity to showcase the city and raise funds for various charities.

In  May 2016 I was honoured to win ’The Cube Photographer of the Year’, after submitting one of my photos of the iconic building.

In 2016 I started to take photographs of the demolition of the old Central Library at the site of the new Paradise Birmingham development, I posted regular photos on my then Twitter account.

Later in 2016 I was also contacted by a gentleman from Price Waterhouse Cooper in Birmingham inviting me to display my photos of the construction of their new headquarters at Paradise Birmingham, One Chamberlain Square, as a timeline gallery at their current base.

I continued to photograph the construction of the building and was invited by PwC to collaborate on a ‘coffee table’ book about the building using mainly my construction photos.

This was completed in December 2019 and I went to the opening of the building where the book was distributed to lots of people and I got one to take home.

Encouraged, I continued to create further construction photo journals for many other significant buildings in Birmingham, including the further projects at the Paradise Birmingham development; Two Chamberlain Square; One Centenary Way; the Octagon and Three Chamberlain Square, with more to come.

I have also created photo journals for the Bank Birmingham towers One and Two; The Mercian; 103 Colmore Row; One Centenary Square (HSBC UK); Three Arena Central and Cortland Square. I am currently producing photo journals for One Eastside; Beorma Quarter; Great Charles Street and the Edition development.

For some of the more recent construction projects I have been paid for the regular supply of photographs and would like to have more opportunities to cover other developments as a professional photographer, please contact me if you would like to chat about this.

In July 2022 the fabulous mechanical bull from the Commonwealth Games opening ceremony was placed in Centenary Square and I got lots of photos of it. When the news of the eventual scrapping of it broke there was an understandable uproar and a campaign to save it was started by BBC Sports presenter Mike Bushell which was eventually successful.

I was very honoured to gift a canvas of one of my photos of the bull, a close up of the red lit eye, to Mike who gratefully received it and said it would be installed in the BBC Sports office.

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I offer photography on a bespoke basis and can offer favourable rates. Please see my Photography Services Page.

I continue to take general photography of Birmingham on a regular basis, posting photos on my social media accounts and continuing to add to the galleries on this website. I also post photographs of places that I visit.

Some of my photography is available to purchase as a full resolution file to download that you can get printed or to use for digital purposes. Please see the available images on my BuyMeaCoffee.com portfolio.

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I mostly do photography as a passion, if you enjoy viewing my images please consider making a small donation (as little as £1) towards my coffee consumption, it would be genuinely appreciated!

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